Round About the North Pole

by W. J. Gordon

In July, 1742, Christopher Middleton, working northwards in Hudson Bay from Fort Churchill, made his way up Rowe's Welcome and entered a deep inlet apparently leading to the South Sea. Middleton—who gained his Fellowship of the Royal Society for his variation observations at Fort Churchill, and was the first to practise the modern method of finding longitude by eight or ten different altitudes of the sun or stars when near the prime vertical—spent eighteen days in the inlet observing the tides, and then came to the conclusion that it was an estuary; and he named it Wager River after Sir Charles Wager, who was First Lord of the Admiralty when he began his voyage. Proceeding north, he reached his Repulse Bay, and at the north-east end of it saw Frozen Strait, as he called it, stretching away along the north of Southampton Island towards Cape Comfort. Here, also from tidal observations, he satisfied himself that Repulse Bay afforded no passage to the westward and that Frozen Strait led into Fox Channel.

AN IGLOOLIK ESKIMO CARRYING HIS KAYAK

His opinions were disputed by those who only knew the coast from his chart, and two vessels were sent out to prove he was wrong. The reports of the captains of these—there is no need to mention their names—were embarrassing. Neither had been to Repulse Bay, but both had been to Wager River, and they agreed that it was unmistakably a river and not a strait; but in every other respect, even in naming the places they had seen, they were at variance. Thus the matter was left in sufficient doubt to encourage some people in believing in a north-west passage through Repulse Bay, just at the Arctic Circle, and to seek this, Parry, on his return from Melville Island, was despatched on his second voyage.

This time the Hecla was commanded by George Francis Lyon—the North African traveller—Parry being in the Fury, a sister ship; both vessels, at Parry's suggestion, being exactly alike so that their gear and fittings were interchangeable. They sailed from the Little Nore on the 8th of May, 1821, and going direct up Frozen Strait, with much trouble from the ice, ran into Repulse Bay on the 22nd of August. Here after a careful examination it was ascertained beyond a doubt that no passage existed through to the westward. "Thus," says Lyon, "the veracity of poor Middleton, as far as regards this bay at least, was now at length established; and in looking down the strait we had passed, he was fully justified in calling it a frozen strait. We were now indisputably on our scene of future action, the coast of America; and it only remained for us to follow minutely the line of shore in continuation from Repulse Bay."

During a stay at Gore Bay red snow was brought off to the Fury, its colour being much fainter than that found in the Isabella voyage at Crimson Cliffs in Greenland; "the appearance of the mass was not unlike what is called raspberry ice, in a far better climate, where cold is made subservient to luxury." The colouring of this is due to one of the Algæ, Protococcus nivalis, and not as Peter Paterson said in 1671—ninety years before De Saussure—to the rocks being "full of white, red, and yellow veins, like marble; upon any alteration of the weather, these stones sweat, which, together with the rains, tinges the snow red." The day on which this snow was found, the 30th of August, was so warm that the party were glad to pull off their coats and waistcoats. "The valleys were fertile in grasses and moss; and the fineness of the weather had drawn forth a number of butterflies, spiders, and other insects, which would, by their gay colours and active motions, have almost deceived us into an idea that we were not in the Arctic regions, had not the Frozen Strait, filled with huge masses of moving ice, reminded us but too forcibly, that we were in the most dangerous of them."

PARRY'S FARTHEST ON HIS THIRD VOYAGE

Early in October the ships took up their quarters at Winter Island on the coast of Melville Peninsula in 66° 32´, and there, during the cordial intercourse with the Eskimos, Parry heard of the way through further north which led him on his release in the following July to discover Fury and Hecla Strait, along which the ships passed to find their progress blocked by the ice just beyond its entrance into Regent Inlet. Returning through the strait, they reached the island of Igloolik at the eastern entrance, and there they passed the winter, Igloolik being an important Eskimo settlement, with four fixed places of residence on it, to which as the season changes the natives move in rotation. From this island, as the health of the men did not permit of his venturing to spend another winter in the ice, Parry retraced his route and returned to England.

The ships dropped anchor in the Thames on Trafalgar Day, 1823. Next year, on the 19th of May, they were off again to the north to seek a passage to the west down Prince Regent Inlet, Parry in the Hecla, Hoppner in the Fury. It was a bad season. The ships were late in leaving Baffin Bay and were hindered by new ice in Lancaster Sound. So far from reaching the strait discovered two years before, they could get no further south than Port Bowen, in 73° 12´, where they spent the winter in a singularly barren part of Cockburn Land. Starting in July they went down to Cresswell Bay, the ships being forced by the weather and the ice to work—as is not unusual under such circumstances—in almost every possible direction within every mile, their track—as shown in the illustration—being most complicated. The end of it all was that the Fury was wrecked and her stores carefully taken out and left, on what was named Fury Beach, for the use of future callers in want of them. And the Hecla came home alone.