THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE.
Arctic explorers.
1850. McClure finds the northwest passage.
The names of Barrow, Ross, Parry, and Franklin, not to mention others of a later period, make the story of the final severance of the continent in the arctic seas one of conspicuous interest in the history of maritime exploration. Captain Robert L. McClure, in the "Investigator," late in 1850 passed into Bering's Straits, and before September closed his ship was bound in the ice. In October McClure made a sledge journey easterly over a frozen channel and reached the open sea, which thirty years before Parry had passed into from the Atlantic side. The northwest passage was at last discovered.
We have seen that within thirty years from the death of Columbus the outline of South America was defined, while it had taken nearly two centuries and a quarter to free the coast lines of the New World from an entanglement in men's minds with the outlines of eastern Asia, and another century and a quarter were required to complete the arctic contour of America, so that the New World at last should stand a wholly revealed and separate continent.
Nor had all this labor been done by governments alone. The private merchant and the individual adventurer, equipping ships and sailing without national help, had done no small part of it. Dr. Kohl strikingly says, "The extreme northern limit of America, the desolate peninsula Boothia, is named after the English merchant who fitted out the arctic expedition of Sir John Ross; and the southernmost strait, beyond Patagonia, preserves the name of Le Maire, the merchant at whose charge it was disclosed to the world!"