fter 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 destruct