CAIRNS ON WASHINGTON IRVING ISLAND.
As we pass Cape Constitution, Kane’s furthest, the air, 6° below freezing, warns us that this year’s navigable season is already far gone, but the dazzling sunlight ahead shows but little ice save the film already forming on the sea. Twenty hours’ steam at this rate would take us beyond where ship had ever sailed. But, alas! “open seas” inside the Polar ice are disappointingly limited. Fragments of pack increase in masses, and at length stretch across the channel in a long white line from shore to shore. But a degree and a-half of latitude has been gained, and the 81° parallel lies five miles behind us as the ships are secured between Hannah Island and the grey cliffs of Bessels Bay. The island is merely a number of gravel mounds forming a convex breakwater in the entrance of the narrow fiord. Looking northward from it, Hall’s Basin lay before us, bounded on the right by Cape Morton and Joe Island, and far away beyond the mouth of Petermann Fiord the valley of Hall’s Rest and the distant headlands of “Polaris” Promontory; while to the left, at the other side of the strait, the snowy cliffs of Grant Land formed the western lintel of Robeson Channel. There was little time to explore the island. A sketch which supplies the accompanying engraving was just complete when the signal for recall flew from the foremast of H.M.S. “Alert.” A lead had opened to the north-westward; the whole of the ice was in motion, and that night both ships reached the northern shores of Lady Franklin Straits before the closing pack barred further progress.
Plate III.—MUSK OX HUNT, DISCOVERY HARBOUR, Midnight, August 25, 1875—p. [25].
OUR first musk ox hunt led us to an isolated hill-top overlooking the bay in which H.M.S. “Discovery” afterwards wintered. This sketch was made on the following evening, from the spot where seven of the herd had fallen. Looking southward across the bay, and beyond Bellot Island, Lady Franklin Sound extends away to the south-west; and at the other side of the sound Grinnell Land rises in a line of straight cliffs, and spreads away towards Cape Leiber on the left, and to the distant peaks of the Victoria and Albert range on the right.