huge parent glacier than of anything else, for lanes of water, or clear spaces of sea, are seldom if ever seen amongst it; indeed, so compact, so impenetrable is its character, that as yet no navigator has ever succeeded in crossing any of the ice-streams from this sea of desolation.
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One of these impenetrable ice-streams flows down between Melville and Banks’s Land, and impinging with fearful force upon the exposed western shores of Prince of Wales’s Land and the islands across Barrow’s Straits, curves down what we hope will be called M ‘Clin toe k Channel, until it is fairly blocked up in the narrows about King William’s Land. Here the southern edge of the ice-stream comes in contact with the warm waters flowing northward from the rivers of the continent of America, and undergoes a constant and rapid disintegration, the rear of the ice-stream ever pressing forward, yet constantly melted away,* as it reaches the limit which Providence has set upon it.
As Franklin sailed to the west from Beechey Island, he fell upon the edge of this ice-stream in about the longitude of Cape Walker; then to the west of it, and of Lowther, Young, and Hamilton Islands, he observed the floes being broken up, and rapidly disintegrated by meeting the warm waters of Barrow’s Straits; but within and amongst that pack there could have been no hope of a passage, whilst on the other hand the ridges of pressed-up shingle and off-lying shoals round the land west of Cape Walker threatened destruction to the Erebus and Terror if they attempted that route; whereas, as far as they could look southward between Capes Walker and Bunny, there stretched away a fair and promising channel leading direct to the American continent, and with ice in it of no very aged appearance. Who that has stood as they did on Cape Walker can doubt which route Franklin preferred under such circumstances?
The middle of August, and a fortnight of navigation are before them. A lead! a lead! and large water! away to the south, calls the ice-master from the crow’s nest, and from under the friendly shelter of Cape Walker the Expedition bears away, and they progress a-pace down what we know as Peel’s Channel. On the eastern hand rise the Bteep black cliffs of North Somerset, cut here and there with deep cleft and snow-filled
- Taking the drift of the lost Erebus and Torror from September, 1846, to April, 1848, as our guide, this ice stream moves at about the rate of a mile and-a-half in a month.
ravine; along the base a ridge of ice is piled up;
full forty feet high, it gleams in white and blue
against the granite cliff, and is reflected in the
calm waters of an Arctic summer’s day — how still,
how calm, how sublimely grand — but the experienced seaman is not beguiled by the deceptive
beauty of such a scene, but thinks of the dark
and stormy nights when, and that before many
short days are past, the north-west hurricane will
again launch against those cliffs, the ice-fields of
Melville Strait. On the western hand, the sand-stone cliffs, and the sheltered coves of Prince of
Wales’s Land, have donned their brightest looks,
and siren-like, lure the discoverer, by many an
unexplored bay and fiord, to delay awhile and visit
them. It may not be; the Erebus and Terror press
on, for is not Cape Herschel of King William’s
Land and the American continent ahead — are they
not fast nearing it? Once there, will they not
have discovered the long-sought passage? Will
they not have done that “one thing whereby great
minds may become notable.” Two degrees of
latitude are passed over; the passage contracts; for
awhile it looks as if they were in a cul-de-sac;
islands locked in with one another, excite some
anxiety for a channel. The two ships are close to
each other, the eager officers and men crowd gun-wale and tops. Hepburn Island bars the way:
they round it. Hurrah, hurrah! the path opens
before them, the lands on either hand recede, as
sea, an open sea, is before them. They dip their
ensigns, and cheer each other in friendly congratulation: joy, joy! another one hundred miles, and
King William’s Island will rise in view. The
prize is now within their grasp, whatever be the
cost.
The sailor’s prayer for open water is, however, only granted in a limited sense, for directly the coast of Prince of Wales’s Island is lost to view, and that they are no longer shielded by land to the west, the great ice- stream from Melville Island again falls upon it. The Erebus and Terror pass a channel leading into Kegent’s Inlet, our Bellot
Channel; they advance down the edge of that ice-stream as far as latitude 71°. The only passage to