We pitched our little camp here, and sat down to our repast; for I found that though we were to go back to lodge, yet my patron had taken care we should be furnished sufficiently for dinner, and have a good house to eat it in, that is to say, a tent as before. The place where we stood, though we had come down hill for a great way, yet seemed very high from the ordinary surface of the country, and gave us therefore an exceeding fine prospect of it, the country declining gradually for near ten miles; and we thought, as well as the distance of the place would allow us, we saw a great river, but, as I learned afterwards, it was rather a great lake than a river, which was supplied by the smaller rivers, or rivulets, from the mountains, which met there as in a great receptacle of waters, and out of this lake they all issued again in one river, of which I shall have occasion to give a farther account hereafter. While we were at dinner, I ordered my midshipmen to take their observations of every distant object, and to look at everything with their glasses, which they did, and told me of this lake; but my patron could give no account of it, having never been, as he said before, one step farther that way than where we were. However, my men showed me plainly that it was a great lake, and that there went a large river from it towards the east-south-east, and this was enough for me, for that way lay all the schemes I had laid. I took this opportunity to ask my midshipmen, first, if they had taken such observations in their passage of the mountains as that they were sure they could find their way through to this place again without guides? And they assured me they could. Then I put it to them whether they thought it might not be practicable to travel over that vast level country to the North Seas? and to make a sufficient discovery of the country, so as that hereafter Englishmen coming to the coast on the side of those seas, might penetrate to these golden mountains, and reap the benefit of the treasure without going a prodigious length above Cape Horn and the Terra del Fuego, which was always attended with innumerable dangers, and without breaking through the kingdom of Chili and the Spaniards' settlements, which, perhaps, we might soon be at peace with, and so be shut out that way by our own consents? One of my men began to speak of the difficulties of such an attempt, the want of provisions, and other dangers which we should be exposed to on the way; but the other, a bold, brisk fellow, told me he made no question but it might be easily done, and especially because all the rivers they should meet with would, of course, run along with us, so that we should be sure to have the tide with us, as he called it; and, at last, he added, that he would be content to be one of those men who should undertake it, provided he should be assured that the ships in the mean time would not go away, and pretend that they could not be found.