The voyage was uneventful, except for the usual incidents that attended the westward journey of the Company's annual fleet. Not a detail, however, escaped the keen eye of the young traveller, unaccustomed as he was to anything but the quiet life of the school, and thirsting to see something of the world, which he knew only in the pages of Gulliver and Robinson Crusoe. The ship sailed up the North Sea to Stromness in the Orkneys, there to wait three weeks for the two vessels which were to accompany her across the Atlantic, and to receive final instructions and sailing orders. As they lay in the harbour of Stromness, Thompson's keen eyes noted the strange life of the kelp-burners on shore, men, women, and children who, half-naked, gathered the dripping sea-weed in baskets, and lugged it on their shoulders to the kilns. Gazing at the rocky shore line and the low, dark cottages with their smoky peat fires, which dotted the barren hills, he was smitten with regret for the rich meadows and woods of England, and for a moment he wished himself back amid the scenes of his school life. Yet in his rambles ashore, the lad found much to interest him. He observed with amusement the quaint habits of the cottagers, who combined a brisk trade in smuggled liquor with lengthy and solemn weekly devotions at the old-fashioned Kirk by the shores of the harbour. Sailing orders finally arrived from London, and the little fleet was soon off on its hazardous journey across the stormy North Atlantic. Presently the sight of icebergs drifting south with the Arctic current, warned the crews that they were nearing Hudson Straits. It was a month before they had worked their way through the floating ice of the Straits; after which the three ships separated, one for the factories at Moose and Albany rivers, the second for York, while the Prince Rupert, with Thompson aboard, headed _for Churchill_, the most northerly of the Company's settlements on the west side of the Bay. Before long, they sighted the granite coast, which they followed southward. This ended at Churchill in a low point of rock and sand, surmounted by the grim stone battlements of Fort Prince of Wales, which two years before had been gutted by the French in their raid on the Bay. Rounding this point, they found themselves in the mouth of the Churchill, a noble stream, almost a mile in breadth. Up the river they made their way for a distance of five miles to a small bay at the head of the estuary, where they cast anchor before the log huts of the still unfinished new fort.