rd alone, that breaks at night,
Its tale of ruin tells.
Thus Freedom now so seldom wakes,
The only throb she gives,
Is when some heart indignant breaks,
To show that still she lives.

Moore

HUDSON STRAIT

Hudson Strait opens from the Atlantic between Resolution Island on the
north and the Button Islands on the south. From point to point, this end
of the strait is forty-five miles wide. At the other end, the west side,
between Digges' Island and Nottingham Island, is a distance of
thirty-five miles. From east to west, the straits are four hundred and
fifty miles long--wider at the east where the south side is known as
Ungava Bay, contracting at the west, to the Upper Narrows. The south
side of the strait is Labrador; the north, Baffin's Land. Both sides are
lofty, rocky, cavernous shores lashed by a tide that rises in places as
high as thirty-five feet and runs in calm weather ten miles an hour.
Pink granite islands dot the north shore in groups that afford
harbourage, but all shores present an adamant front, edges sharp as a
knife or else rounded hard to have withstood and cut the tremendous ice
jam of a floating world suddenly contracted to forty miles, which Davis
Strait pours down at the east end and Fox Channel at the west.

Seven hundred feet is considered a good-sized hill; one thousand feet, a
mountain. Both the north and the south sides of the straits rise two
thousand feet in places. Through these rock walls ice has poured and
torn and ripped a way since the ice age preceding history, cutting a
great channel to the Atlantic. Here, the iron walls suddenly break to
secluded silent valleys, moss-padded, snow-edged, lonely as the day
Earth first saw light. Down these valleys pour the clear streams of the
eternal snows, burnished as silver against the green, setting the
silence echoing with the tinkle of cataracts over some rock wall, or
filling the air with the voice of many waters at noontide thaw. One old
navigator--Coates--describes the beat of the angry tide at the rock base
and the silver voice of the mountain brooks, like the treble and bass of
some great cathedral organ sounding its diapason to the glory of God in
this peopleless wilderness.

Perhaps the kyacks of some solitary Eskimo, lashed abreast twos and
threes to prevent capsizing, may shoot out from some of these
bog-covered valleys like sea-birds; but it is only when the Eskimos
happen to be hunting here, or