[L] I was not provided with instruments for cutting on stone; but for form-sake, I cut my name, date of the year, &c., on a piece of board that had been one of the Indian's targets, and placed it in a heap of stones on a small eminence near the entrance of the river, on the South side.
[M] There is certainly no harm in making out all Instructions in the fullest manner, yet it must be allowed that those two parts might have been omitted with great propriety; for as neither Middleton, Ellis, nor Christopher were able to penetrate far enough up those inlets to discover any kind of herbage except moss and grass, much less woods, it was not likely those parts were so materially altered for the better since their times, as to make it worth my while to attempt a farther discovery of them; and especially as I had an opportunity, during my second Journey, of proving that the woods do not reach the sea-coast by some hundreds of miles in the parallel of Chesterfield's Inlet. And as the edge of the woods to the Northward always tends to the Westward, the distance must be greatly increased in the latitude of Wager Strait. Those parts have long since been visited by the Company's servants, and are within the known limits of their Charter; consequently require no other form of possession.
[O] The Continent of America is much wider than many people imagine, particularly Robson, who thought that the Pacific Ocean was but a few days journey from the West coast of Hudson's Bay. This, however, is so far from being the case, that when I was at my greatest Western distance, upward of five hundred miles from Prince of Wales's Fort, the natives, my guides, well knew that many tribes of Indians lay to the West of us, and they knew no end to the land in that direction; nor have I met with any Indians, either Northern or Southern, that ever had seen the sea to the Westward. It is, indeed, well known to the intelligent and well-informed part of the Company's servants, that an extensive and numerous tribe of Indians, called E-arch-e-thinnews, whose country lies far West of any of the Company's or Canadian settlements, must have traffic with the Spaniards on the West side of the Continent; because some of the Indians who formerly traded to York Fort, when at war with those people, frequently found saddles, bridles, muskets, and many other articles, in their possession, which were undoubtedly of Spanish manufactory.