RETURN HOME. 329 



at length he launched it, loaded it, and pushed off. He 

 had proceeded only ten miles, when he was obliged to 

 seek refuge in a bay from a westerly gale and a strong 

 head sea ; and he afterwards contended much and 

 almost constantly with unfavorable winds and rapid 

 tides ; yet he succeeded in examining three hundred 

 and ten miles of coast, and did not desist till his stock 

 of provisions began to fail. He put about on the 20th 

 of July, and made his way to the ships amid constant 

 rain and tempest, insomuch that, in the route over the 

 ice, he had to ford rapid streams. 



Penny thus ranks high as a discoverer ; but as to the 

 immediate object of his adventures, he had all his labor 

 for nothing. He found not a trace of the Erebus and 

 the Terror ; yet he confirmed his convictions that they 

 had gone up Wellington Channel and along Victoria 

 Channel. 



The American explorers were prevented from taking 

 any part in the searching operations of the spring, by 

 their experiencing the same kind of involuntary ejection 

 from Lancaster Sound which befell Sir James Ross's ex- 

 pedition in the Enterprise and the Investigator. Their 

 vessels were frozen in opposite Wellington Channel, and 

 were carried thence to the east, slowly and rigidly, and 

 in stern defiance of all possible resistance by man, to a 

 point south of Cape Walsingham. They drifted a 

 linear distance of at least one thousand and fifty miles, 

 and suffered much from the commotion of the ice, and 

 were not set free till the 10th of June. 



Captain Austin seems to have concurred with Sir John 

 Ross in the opinion that the Erebus and the Terror had 

 gone back to Baffin's Bay. After the failure of searches 

 for further traces of them west and north of the mouth 

 of Wellington Channel, Austin supposed that they 

 probably tried to reach the Polar Sea through Jones's 



