Читать книгу Arctic Searching Expedition (Sir John Richardson) - comprehensive & illustrated - (Literary Thoughts Edition) онлайн

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While the body of the party was thus passing the winter at Cumberland House and its vicinity, I was almost daily receiving letters from officers of various ranks in the army and navy, and from civilians of different stations in life, expressing an ardent desire for employment in the expedition. It may interest the reader to know that among the applicants, there were two clergymen, one justice of peace for a Welsh county, several country gentlemen, and some scientific foreigners, all evidently imbued with a generous love of enterprise, and a humane desire to be the means of carrying relief to a large body of their fellow creatures. But as long as there remained a hope of the return of the discovery ships in the autumn of 1847, it was not thought necessary to take any steps for the appointment of a second officer to the party which I was to command. In November, however, when the last whalers from Davis's Straits had come in, I suggested to the late Lord Auckland, then the First Lord of the Admiralty, that Mr. John Rae, chief trader of the Hudson's Bay Company, was fully qualified for the peculiar nature of the service on which we were to be employed. He had resided upwards of fifteen years in Prince Rupert's Land, was thoroughly versed in all the methods of developing and turning to advantage the natural products of the country, a skilful hunter, expert in expedients for tempering the severity of the climate, an accurate observer with the sextant and other instruments usually employed to determine the latitude and longitude, or the variations and dip of the magnetic needle, and had just brought to a successful conclusion, under circumstances of very unusual privation, an expedition of discovery fitted out by the Hudson's Bay Company, for the purpose of exploring the limits of Regent's Inlet. Lord Auckland highly approved of my suggestion, and Mr. Rae was appointed with the assent of the Governor and Committee of the Hudson's Bay Company.