THE ICE-BELT. Polar waters into Baffin Bay through the Parry Archipelago, crosses thence to Greenland, from Greenland to Spitzbergen, and from Spitzbergen to Nova Zembla,—thus investing the Pole in an uninterrupted land-clinging belt of ice, more or less broken as well in winter as in summer, and the fragments ever moving to and fro, though never widely separating, forming a barrier against which all the arts and energies of man have not hitherto prevailed.
If the reader would further pursue the inquiry, let him place one leg of a pair of dividers on the map near the North Pole (say in latitude 86°, longitude 160° W.), and inscribe a circle two thousand miles in diameter, and he will have touched the margin of the land and the mean line of the ice-belt throughout its wide circuit, and have covered an area of more than three millions of square miles.
Although this ice-belt has not been broken through, it has been penetrated in many places, and its southern margin has been followed, partly along the waters formed near the land by the discharging rivers of the Arctic water-sheds of Asia and America, and partly by working through the ice which is always more or less loosened by the summer. It was in this manner that various navigators have attempted the northwest passage; and it was after following the coast line from Behring Strait to Banks Land, and then pushing through the broken ice that Sir Robert McClure finally succeeded in effecting this long-sought-for passage—not, however, by carrying his ship completely through, but by traveling over the winter ice three hundred miles to Wellington Channel, whence he returned home through Baffin Bay in a ship that had come from the eastward. And it was in this
