That night the men were allowed ashore. It was a desolate, silent, mountainous region that seemed to lie in an eternal sleep. Birds were in myriads—their flacker but making the profound silence more cavernous. When a sailor uttered a shout, there was no answer but the echo of his own voice, thin and weird and lonely, as if he, too, would be swallowed up by those deathly silences. Men ran over the ice chasing a polar bear. Others went gunning for partridge. The hills were presently rocketing with the crash and echo of musketry. Prickett climbed a high rock to spy ahead. Open water lay to the southwest. It was like a sea—perhaps the South Sea; and to the southwest Hudson steered past Charles and Salisbury Islands, through “_a whurling sea_”—the Second Narrows—between two high headlands, Digges island on one side, Cape Wolstenholme on the other, eventually putting into Port Laperriere on Digges Island. Except for two or three government stations where whaling captains forgather in log cabins, the whole region from Ungava Bay to Digges Island, four hundred miles, practically the whole length of the Straits on the south—is as unexplored to-day as when Hudson first sailed those waters. The crew went ashore hunting partridge over the steep rocks of the island and examining stone caches of the absent Eskimo. Hudson took a careful observation of the sea. Before him lay open water—beyond was sea, a sea to the south! Was it the South Sea? The old record says he was proudly confident it was the South Sea, for it was plainly a sea as large as the Baltic or Mediterranean. Fog falling, cannon were set booming and rocketing among the hills to call the hunters home. It was now August 4. A month had passed since he entered the Straits. If it took another month to go back through them, the boat would be winter-bound and could not reach England. There was no time to lose. Keeping between the east coast of the bay with its high rocks and that line of reefed islands known as The Sleepers, _The Discovery_ pushed on south, where the lookout still reported “_a large sea to the fore_.” This is a region, which at this late day of the world’s history, still remains almost unknown. The men who have explored it could be counted on one hand. Towering rocks absolutely bare but for moss, with valley between where the spring thaw creates continual muskeg—moss on water dangerous as quicksands—are broken by swampy tracks; and near Richmond, where the Hudson’s Bay Fur Company maintained a post for a few years, the scenery attains a degree of grandeur similar to Norway, groves covering the rocky shores, cataracts shattering over the precipices and lonely vistas opening to beautiful meadows, where the foot of man has never trod. But for some unknown reason, game has always been scarce on the east side of Hudson Bay. Legends of mines have been told by the Indians, but no one has yet found the mines.