Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage | Page 8

to a royal bounty of five thousand pounds. This group of islands Parry called North Georgian, but they are usually called by his own name, Parry Islands. This was the first European winter party in the Arctic circle. Its details are familiar enough. How the men cut in three days, through ice seven inches thick, a canal two miles and a half long, and so brought the ships into safe harbour. How the genius of Parry equalled the occasion; how there was established a theatre and a North Georgian Gazette, to cheer the tediousness of a night which continued for two thousand hours. The dreary, dazzling waste in which there was that little patch of life, the stars, the fog, the moonlight, the glittering wonder of the northern lights, in which, as Greenlanders believe, souls of the wicked dance tormented, are familiar to us. The she-bear stays at home; but the he-bear hungers, and looks in vain for a stray seal or walrus--woe to the unarmed man who meets him in his hungry mood! Wolves are abroad, and pretty white arctic foxes. The reindeer have sought other pasture-ground. The thermometer runs down to more than sixty degrees below freezing, a temperature tolerable in calm weather, but distressing in a wind. The eye-piece of the telescope must be protected now with leather, for the skin is destroyed that comes in contact with cold metal. The voice at a mile's distance can be heard distinctly. Happy the day when first the sun is seen to graze the edge of the horizon; but summer must come, and the heat of a constant day must accumulate, and summer wane, before the ice is melted. Then the ice cracks, like cannons over-charged, and moves with a loud grinding noise. But not yet is escape to be made with safety. After a detention of ten months, Parry got free; but, in escaping, narrowly missed the destruction of both ships, by their being "nipped" between the mighty mass and the unyielding shore. What animals are found on Melville Island we may judge from the results of sport during ten months' detention. The island exceeds five thousand miles square, and yielded to the gun, three musk oxen, twenty-four deer, sixty-eight hares, fifty-three geese, fifty-nine ducks, and one hundred and forty-four ptarmigans, weighing together three thousand seven hundred and sixty-six pounds--not quite two ounces of meat per day to every man. Lichens, stunted grass, saxifrage, and a feeble willow, are the plants of Melville Island, but in sheltered nooks there are found sorrel, poppy, and a yellow buttercup. Halos and double suns are very common consequences of refraction in this quarter of the world. Franklin returned from his first and most famous voyage with his men all safe and sound, except the loss of a few fingers, frost-bitten. We sail back only as far as Regent's Inlet, being bound for Behring Strait.
The reputation of Sir John Ross being clouded by discontent expressed against his first expedition, Felix Booth, a rich distiller, provided seventeen thousand pounds to enable his friend to redeem his credit. Sir John accordingly, in 1829, went out in the Victory, provided with steam-machinery that did not answer well. He was accompanied by Sir James Ross, his nephew. He it was who, on this occasion, first surveyed Regent's Inlet, down which we are now sailing with our Phantom Ship. The coast on our right hand, westward, which Parry saw, is called North Somerset, but farther south, where the inlet widens, the land is named Boothia Felix. Five years before this, Parry, in his third voyage, had attempted to pass down Regent's Inlet, where among ice and storm, one of his ships, the Hecla, had been driven violently ashore, and of necessity abandoned. The stores had been removed, and Sir John was able now to replenish his own vessel from them. Rounding a point at the bottom of Prince Regent's Inlet, we find Felix Harbour, where Sir John Ross wintered. His nephew made from this point scientific explorations; discovered a strait, called after him the Strait of James Ross, and on the northern shore of this strait, on the main land of Boothia, planted the British flag on the Northern Magnetic Pole. The ice broke up, so did the Victory; after a hairbreadth escape, the party found a searching vessel and arrived home after an absence of four years and five months, Sir John Ross having lost his ship, and won his reputation, The friend in need was made a baronet for his munificence; Sir John was reimbursed for all his losses, and the crew liberally taken care of. Sir James Ross had a rod and flag signifying "Magnetic Pole," given to him for a new crest, by the Heralds' College, for which he was no doubt greatly