deg. below freezing-point, parties left the encampment under
Lieutenants Browne and Mecham, to look around for cairns, &c., and
report upon the trend of the land, whilst the rest of us secured a
depot of Halkett's boats, and built a cairn as a record of our visit.

As it is not my intention to give a detailed account of the operations
of the Southern Division, but merely to tell of those events which will
convey to the reader a general idea of the incidents connected with
Arctic travelling, I shall without further comment give them, leaving
to the curious in the minutiae of the journeys the amusement of reading
in the Admiralty Blue Books the details of when we eat, drank, slept,
or marched.

Cape Walker was found to form the eastern and most lofty extreme of a
land-trending to the south-west on its northern coast, and to the south
on its eastern shore. The cape itself, full 1000 feet in altitude, was
formed of red sandstone and conglomerate, very abrupt to the eastward,
but dipping with an undulating outline to the west.

In its immediate neighbourhood no traces of Franklin having visited it
were to be seen, and, as a broad channel ran to the southward (there
was every reason to believe down to the American continent, and thence
to Behring's Straits), by which Franklin might have attempted to pass,
Captain Ommanney, very properly despatched Lieutenant Browne to examine
the coast of Cape Walker Land, down the channel to the southward; and
then, the "Success" sledge having previously departed with invalids,
the five remaining sledges, on the evening of the 24th of April,
marched to the westward. Previous to that date it had been impossible
to move, on account of a strong gale in our faces, together with a
severe temperature.

[Headnote: _INJURY TO THE EYES._]

Every mile that we advanced showed us that the coast was one which
could only be approachable by ships at extraordinary seasons: the ice
appeared the accumulation of many years, and bore, for some forty
miles, a quiet, undisturbed look. Then we passed into a region with
still more aged features: there the inequalities on the surface,
occasioned by the repeated snows of winter and thaws of summer, gave it
the appearance of a constant succession of hill and dale. Entangled
amongst it, our men laboured with untiring energy, up steep acclivities
and through pigmy ravines, in which the loose snow caused them to sink
deeply, and sadly increased their toil. To avoid