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

he called after the Secretary of the Admiralty who had
so indefatigably laboured to promote the expeditions, Barrow's Strait.
Then he came to a channel, turning to the right or northward, and he
named that Wellington Channel. Then he had on his right hand ice,
islands large and small, and intervening channels; on the left, ice, and a
cape visible, Cape Walker. At an island, named after the First Lord of
the Admiralty Melville Island, the great frozen wilderness barred
farther progress. There he wintered. On the coast of Melville Island
they had passed the latitude of one hundred and ten degrees, and the
men had become entitled 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