ion
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