While at Rigolet we of course tried to get all the information
possible about the country to which we were going. No Indians had
been to the post for months, and the white men and Eskimos knew
absolutely nothing about it. At length Hubbard was referred to
"Skipper" Tom Blake, a breed, who had trapped at the upper or
western end of Grand Lake. From Blake he learned that Grand Lake
was forty miles long, and that canoe travel on it was good to its
upper end, where the Nascaupee River flowed into it. Blake
believed we could paddle up the Nascaupee some eighteen or twenty
miles, where we should find the Red River, a wide, shallow, rapid
stream that flowed into the Nascaupee from the south. Above this
point he had no personal knowledge of the country, and advised us
to see his son Donald, whom he expected to arrive that day from his
trapping grounds on Seal Lake. Donald, he said, had been farther
inland and knew more about the country than anyone else on the
coast.

Donald did arrive a little later, and upon questioning him Hubbard
learned that Seal Lake, which, he said, was an expansion of the
Nascaupee River, had been the limit of his travels inland. Donald
reiterated what his father had told us of Grand Lake and the lower
waters of the Nascaupee, adding that for many miles above the point
where the Nascaupee was joined by the Red we should find canoe
travel impossible, as the Nascaupee "tumbled right down off the
mountains." Up the Nascaupee as far as the Red River he had sailed
his boat. He had heard from the Indians that the Nascaupee came
from Lake Michikamau, and he believed it to be a fact. This
convinced us that the Nascaupee was the river A. P. Low, of the
Geological Survey, had mapped as the Northwest. The Red River
Donald had crossed in winter some twenty miles above its mouth, and