Hudson Straits may be described as a great arm of the ocean curving to an inland sea the size of the Mediterranean. At each end, the Straits are less than fifty miles wide, lined and interspread with rocky islands and dangerous reefs. Inside, the Straits widen to a breadth of from one hundred to two hundred miles. Ungava Bay on the east is a cup-like basin, which the wash of the iron ice has literally ground out of Labrador’s rocky shore. Half way up at Savage Point about two hundred miles from the ocean, Hudson Straits suddenly contract. This is known as the Second Narrows. The mountainous, snow-clad shores converge to a sharp funnel. Into this funnel pours the jammed, churning maelstrom of ice floes the size of a continent, and against this chaos flings the Atlantic tide. Old fur-trade captains of a later era entered the Straits armed and accoutered as for war. It was a standing regulation among the fur-trade captains always to have one-fourth extra allowance of provisions for the delay in the straits. Six iron-shod ice hooks were carried for mooring to the ice floes. Special cables called “ice ropes” were used. Twelve great ice poles, twelve handspikes all steel-shod, and twelve chisels to drill holes in the ice for powder—were the regulation requirements of the fur traders bound through Hudson Straits. Special rules were issued for captains entering the Straits. A checker-board sky—deep blue reflecting the clear water of ocean, apple-green lights the sign of ice—was the invariable indication of distant ice. “Never go on either at night or in a fog when you have sighted such a sky”—was the rule. “Get your ice tackle ready at the straits.” “Stand away from the indraught between a big iceberg and the tide, for if once the indraught nails you, you are lost.” “To avoid a crush that will sink you in ten minutes, run twenty miles inside the soft ice; that will break the force of the tide.” “Be careful of your lead night and day.” But these rules were learned only after centuries of navigating. All was new to the seamen in Hudson’s day. All that was known to the northern navigator was the trick of throwing out the hook, gripping to a floe, hauling up to it _and worming a way through the ice with a small sail_. Carried with the current southward from Greenland, sometimes slipping into the long “tickles” of water open between the floes, again watching their chance to follow the calm sea to the rear of some giant iceberg, or else mooring to some ice raft honeycombed by the summer’s heat and therefore less likely to ram the hull—_The Discovery_ came to Ungava Bay, Labrador, in July. This is the worst place on the Atlantic seaboard for ice. Old whalers and Moravian missionaries told me when I was in Labrador that the icebergs at Ungava are often by actual measurement nine miles long, and washed by the tide, they have been ground hard and sharp as steel. It is here they begin to break up on their long journey southward.