At this time the Eskimos of the neighbourhood engaged a good deal of Rae’s attention. They appear to have been an extraordinarily hardy race, who suffered no inconvenience even in the bitterest cold. On one occasion he found a member of the tribe engaged in repairing the runners of his sledge. “The substance used,” he writes, “was a mixture of moss chopped up very fine, and snow soaked in water, lumps of which are firmly pressed on the sledge with the bare hand, and smoothed over so as to have an even surface. The process occupied the man nearly an hour, during the whole of which time he did not put his hands in his mits, nor did he appear to feel the cold much, although the temperature was 30° below zero.” On another occasion he paid a visit to their camp, where he acquired the interesting intelligence that it was their custom to strip off all their clothes before retiring to bed even in the depth of winter. They kept their huts comparatively warm, however, by an ever-burning lamp, and Rae observed with some astonishment that, during the visit in question, his waistcoat thawed. That article of his attire had been frozen solid some time before by the congelation of his breath, and had had no opportunity of returning to its normal condition in his own comfortless quarters. On April 5 Rae started off on his second journey across the isthmus which now bears his name, his object being to explore the western shores of Committee Bay and to discover whether any waterway led westward from it to the Arctic seas. With the details of the journey we need scarcely concern ourselves, for it was not enlivened by any incident of special interest. It will be sufficient to say that his efforts were attended by complete success, for on April 18 he reached Lord Mayor’s Bay, the most southern point reached by Ross, thus completing the discovery of the southern and western shores of Prince Regent’s Inlet, and proving that Boothia was a peninsula.