It was with characteristic courtesy and hospitality that M. Duclos,
who was in charge of the French trading post, placed himself and
his house at my service, and our coming was celebrated by a dinner
of wild goose, plum pudding, and coffee. After the voyage from
Halifax it seemed good to rest a little with the firm earth under
foot, and where the walls of one's habitation were still. Through
the open windows came the fragrance of the spruce woods, and from
the little piazza in front of the house you could look down and
across Lake Melville, and away to the blue mountains beyond, where
the snow was still lying in white masses.

The settlement at Northwest River consists mainly of the two
trading posts, the French post with its three buildings--the house,
store and oil house--on the right bank of the river, close to its
discharge into Lake Melville, and higher up on the opposite shore
the line of low, white buildings of the Hudson's Bay Company post.
A few tiny planters' homes complete the sum total of its greatness.

Monday morning the work of preparation for departure into the
wilderness began. My crew numbered four, chief among whom was
George Elson, who had loyally served Mr. Hubbard in 1903, and who,
with rare skill and rarer devotion, had recovered Mr. Hubbard's
body and his photographic material from the interior in the depths
of the following winter. The other two men were Joseph Iserhoff, a
Russian half-breed, and Job Chapies, a pure blood Cree Indian.
These three men were expert hunters and canoemen, having been born
and brought up in the James Bay country, and they came to me from
Missanabie, some 700 miles west of Montreal. The fourth was
Gilbert Blake, a half-breed Eskimo boy trapper, one of the two
young lads of the rescue party George Elson had sent back two years