Page:Narrative of the Discoveries on the North Coast of America.djvu/204

 protected by Jones Islands, our little vessels flew through the foaming waves, which often broke over them from stem to stern. At 3 on the 8th we saw Return Reef, and ran safely into a cove scooped out by a small river in the contiguous mainland. The wind shifted to the north-west, and blew intensely cold. A large herd of deer appeared in the vicinity of our encampment, and one of our half-breed lads, enveloped in a deer-skin robe, approached close to them, but from over-eagerness missed his mark. In the evening a little fawn came to the tents, and was suffered to retreat unmolested; an incident that furnished a name for the streamlet.

9th.—With the morning the weather mitigated, the sun shone out, and the cargoes were exposed to dry. Some good observations were obtained, which placed Fawn River in lat. 70° 25′ 3″ N., long. 148° 24′ 45″ W. Return Reef bore E. N. E. about two miles distant. From this it would appear that my latitude agrees exactly with Sir John Franklin's, but that the longitude is about half a degree or ten miles more to the east; a difference for which I am at a loss to account, as the longitudes of my extreme points of comparison—Tent Island, at the mouth of the Mackenzie, and Point Barrow,—perfectly correspond with the prior determinations of Franklin and