Walrus wallow on the pink granite islands in huge herds. Polar bears flounder from icepan to icepan. The arctic hare, white as snow but for the great bulging black eye, bounds over the bowlders. Snow buntings, whistling swans, snow geese, ducks in myriads—flacker and clacker and hold solemn conclave on the adjoining rocks, as though this were their realm from the beginning and for all time. Of a tremendous depth are the waters of the straits. Not for nothing has the ice world been grinding through this narrow channel for billions of years. No fear of shoals to the mariner. Fear is of another sort. When the ice is running in a whirlpool and the incoming tide meets the ice jam and the waters mount thirty-five feet high and a wind roars between the high shores like a bellows—then it is that the straits roll and pitch and funnel their waters into black troughs where the ships go down. “Undertow,” the old Hudson’s Bay captains called the suck of the tide against the ice-wall; and that black hole where the lumpy billows seemed to part like a passage between wall of ice and wall of water was what the mariners feared. The other great danger was just a plain crush, getting nipped between two icepans rearing and plunging like fighting stallions, with the ice blocks going off like pistol shots or smashed glass. No child’s play is such navigating either for the old sailing vessels of the fur traders or the modern ice-breakers propelled by steam! Yet, the old sailing vessels and the whaling fleets have navigated these straits for two hundred years. Westward of the straits, the shores dropped to low, sandy reaches at Mansfield Island. Another five hundred miles across the bay brought the ships to Churchill and York (Nelson). Here, then, came Captain Knight’s fleet. And the terrific dangers of his venture met him—as it were—on the spot. The records do not give the exact point of the disaster, but one may guess without stretching imagination that it was in the Upper Narrows where thirty-five feet of lashing tide meet a churning wall of ice.