Christopher Middleton—Wager River—Repulse Bay—Parry's second north-west voyage—Melville Peninsula—Fury and Hecla Strait—John Ross's second Arctic voyage—Introduces steam navigation into the Arctic regions—The whaler _John_—Ross misses the North-West Passage—Snow houses—Eskimo geographers—James Clark Ross finds the Magnetic North Pole—Lyon in the _Griper_—Back in the _Terror_—Rae's journey round Committee Bay—Sir John Franklin's last voyage—Kennedy and Bellot—Discovery of Bellot Strait—Rae's journey in 1854—His Franklin discoveries—M'Clintock's voyage in the _Fox_—Lady Franklin's instructions—Captain Charles Hall—Frederick Schwatka—Amundsen accomplishes the North-West Passage. In July, 1742, Christopher Middleton, working northwards in Hudson Bay from Fort Churchill, made his way up Rowe's Welcome and entered a deep inlet apparently leading to the South Sea. Middleton—who gained his Fellowship of the Royal Society for his variation observations at Fort Churchill, and was the first to practise the modern method of finding longitude by eight or ten different altitudes of the sun or stars when near the prime vertical—spent eighteen days in the inlet observing the tides, and then came to the conclusion that it was an estuary; and he named it Wager River after Sir Charles Wager, who was First Lord of the Admiralty when he began his voyage. Proceeding north, he reached his Repulse Bay, and at the north-east end of it saw Frozen Strait, as he called it, stretching away along the north of Southampton Island towards Cape Comfort. Here, also from tidal observations, he satisfied himself that Repulse Bay afforded no passage to the westward and that Frozen Strait led into Fox Channel. [Illustration: AN IGLOOLIK ESKIMO CARRYING HIS KAYAK] His opinions were disputed by those who only knew the coast from his chart, and two vessels were sent out to prove he was wrong. The reports of the captains of these—there is no need to mention their names—were embarrassing. Neither had been to Repulse Bay, but both had been to Wager River, and they agreed that it was unmistakably a river and not a strait; but in every other respect, even in naming the places they had seen, they were at variance. Thus the matter was left in sufficient doubt to encourage some people in believing in a north-west passage through Repulse Bay, just at the Arctic Circle, and to seek this, Parry, on his return from Melville Island, was despatched on his second voyage.