[108] A bentick boom is a long straight spar to which the clews of the foresail are secured.
[109] Spek is the Dutch for blubber.
[110] From the Dutch afmaaken, to finish or adjust.
[111] The Swedish steamer Sophia reached 81° 42′ in 1868.
[112] His life was written by his nephew, Scoresby Jackson.
[113] Commander Buchan again served on the Newfoundland coast in the Grasshopper from 1820 to 1823. Fifteen years afterwards he was lost in the Upton Castle coming home from India, that Indiaman being heard of for the last time on December 8th, 1838.
[114] Sir John Ross was much hurt at the doubting remarks and criticisms respecting the brilliant crimson on his plate of the crimson snow. They still rankled 32 years afterwards when the present writer served with him, and he wrote an article on the subject in our Arctic periodical, the Aurora Borealis. Mr Bauer, of Kew Gardens, it appears, pronounced the crimson snow to be of the genus Uredo, allied to “smut” in wheat, and he grew some in snow. It was first green, then as bright a crimson as in Ross’s plate. Ross called it Uredo nivalis of Bauer in his 2nd edition.
[115] Much attention was given to the provisioning. There were the preserved meats and soups of Donkin and Gamble; Burkitt’s essence of malt, hops, and spruce; lemon juice, vinegar, sauerkraut, pickles, and herbs as antiscorbutics. Coal was used for ballast, 70 chaldrons in the Hecla, 34 in the Griper. The Admiralty supplied warm clothing and wolf-skin blankets for the men without any charge.
[116] Cyrus Wakeman, in the Dorothea with Buchan, and the Griper, 1819–20, was afterwards at the battle of Navarino, where his splendid gallantry is recorded by Lady Bourchier in her Memoirs of Sir Edward Codrington, II, p. 102 (Longman, 1873). He died in the Niger expedition.
Sir Joseph Nias, K.C.B., was in the Alexander, Hecla, and Fury with Parry, 1818–23. He distinguished himself in the Herald during the first China war, at the capture of the forts of the Bocca Tigris and in all the operations in the Canton river, becoming Rear-Admiral in 1857. In 1855 he married Isabella, only child of John Laing of Montagu Square, where he died December 16th 1879.