358 FIRST GRINNELL EXPEDITION. 



day, 1850, by a spirit who could have roamed from end 

 to end of the icy continent, and taken it in at a glance. 

 No less than ten Arctic discovery-ships were winter- 

 ing 1 within a few hundred miles of each other. Under 

 Griffith's Island lay her majesty's ships the Resolute, 

 Assistance, Pioneer, and Intrepid ; in a small bay in 

 North Devon were securely sheltered Captain Penny's 

 two brigs ; the Investigator lay in Prince of Wales 

 Strait ; and at the mouth of Lancaster Sound, drifting 

 helplessly in the pack which had borne them already 

 twelve degrees to the eastward, were the two unfortu- 

 nate ships of the Grirmell expedition. But this was not 

 all. Only three to four hundred miles from the Investi- 

 gator's winter quarters, Mr. Rae was waiting on the 

 border of Great Bear Lake for weather that would allow 

 him to start on his land journey. And, in all human 

 probability, Sir John Franklin's ships, the Erebus and 

 Terror, lay imbedded in the ice, desolate and abandoned, 

 somewhere off the north coast of King William's Land. 

 But where were the men who sailed in t'.iem- -the ob- 

 jects of so many expeditions and sc nuch anxious tope ? 

 Dr. Kane, who wrote a deeply interesting account of 

 the first Grinnell expedition, says, under date of Febru- 

 ary 28th, 1851, when, for some days, the average tem- 

 perature was 53 degrees below zero : " Cold as it was, 

 our mid-day exercise was never interrupted unless by 

 wind and drift-storms. We felt the necessity of active 

 exercise ; and, although the effort was accompanied with 

 pains in the joints, sometimes hardly bearable, we man- 

 aged, both officers and crew, to obtain at least three hours 

 a day. The exercise consisted of foot-ball and sliding, 

 followed by regular games of romps, leap-frog, and tum- 

 bling in the snow. By shovelling away near the 

 vessel, we obtained a fine bare surface of fresh ice, 

 extremely glib and durable. On this we constructed a 



