him to change his opinion; and, on his return to England, he made an unfavourable report.  Mr Dobbs, the patron of the enterprise, did not acquiesce in this; and, fortified in his original idea of the practicability of the passage, by the testimony of some of Middleton’s officers, he appealed to the public, accusing him of having misrepresented facts, and of having, from interested motives, in concert with the Hudson’s Bay Company, decided against the practicability of the passage, though the discoveries of his own voyage had put it within his reach.

He had, between the latitude of 65 deg. and 66 deg., found a very considerable inlet running westward, into which he entered with his ships; and, “after repeated trials of the tides, and endeavours to discover the nature and course of the opening, for three weeks successively, he found the flood constantly to come from the eastward, and that it was a large river he had got into,” to which he gave the name of Wager River."[38]

[Footnote 38:  See the Abstract of his Journal, published by Mr Dobbs.]

The accuracy, or rather the fidelity, of this report, was denied by Mr Dobbs, who contended that this opening is a strait, and not a fresh-water river; and that Middleton, if he had examined it properly, would have found a passage through it to the western American Ocean.  The failure of this voyage, therefore, only served to furnish our zealous advocate for the discovery, with new arguments for attempting it once more; and he had the good fortune, after getting the reward of twenty thousand pounds established by act of parliament, to prevail upon a society of gentlemen and merchants to fit out the Dobbs and California; which ships, it was hoped, would be able to find their way into the Pacific Ocean, by the very opening which Middleton’s Voyage had pointed out, and which he was believed to have misrepresented.

This renovation of hope only produced fresh disappointment For it is well known, that the voyage of the Dobbs and California, instead of confuting, strongly confirmed all that Middleton had asserted.  The supposed strait was found to be nothing more than a fresh-water river, and its utmost western navigable boundaries were now ascertained, by accurate examination.  But though Wager’s Strait had thus disappointed our hopes, as had also done Rankin’s Inlet, which was now found to be a close bay; and though other arguments, founded on the supposed course of the tides in Hudson’s Bay, appeared to be groundless, such is our attachment to an opinion once adopted, that, even after the unsuccessful issue of the voyage of the Dobbs and California, a passage through some other place in that bay was, by many, considered as attainable; and, particularly, Chesterfield’s (formerly:  called Bowden’s) Inlet, lying between latitude 65 deg. and 64 deg., succeeded Wager’s Strait, in the sanguine expectations of those who remained unconvinced by former disappointments.  Mr Ellis,