THE NORTHERN PACK. 85 



" A vessel beset in the pack is as helpless as if she were 

 far inland, while there is imminent danger of being crushed 

 at any moment. When the wind blows on the pack, the 

 drift ice becomes as close ns the pack itself. In addition to 

 the constant twisting, turning, breaking, and piling up of 

 the ice, the whole body has a northern set, moving very 

 slowly, but none the less surely. 



" Having visited every part of the Arctic that it was pos- 

 sible for a vessel to reach, penetrating the icy regions in all 

 directions fifty to one hundred miles further than any vessel 

 succeeded in doing last year, without being able to find the 

 slightest trace or gain the least tidings of the missing 

 whalers, we were forced to the conclusion that they had bcm. 

 crushed and carried north in the pack, and that their crews 

 had perished. Had any of them survived the winter it seems 

 almost certain that they would have been found either by the 

 Corwin or by some of the whalers, all of whom were on the 

 lookout for them during the summer. It was thought possi- 

 ble that the crews might have escaped over the ice and 

 reached Herald Island, but a sight of the perpendicular sides 

 of that most inhospitable-looking place soon banished even 

 this small hope. 



" I have no fears for the safety of the officers and crew of 

 the Jeannette. The fact that they have not been heard from 

 seems to indicate that the vessel is safe, and that they 

 consider themselves able to remain another year at least." 



Many of the desolate places which the Corwin sighted or 

 touched at had been visited and named by English naviga- 

 tors in search of Franklin. A correspondent of the New 

 York Herald speaks of some of them as follows : 



" Notable among those on the Asiatic coast is Emma Har- 

 bor, Plover Bay, Siberia, where Captain Moore wintered in 

 the Plover in 1848-49. It is surrounded on nearly all sides 

 by lofty, barren mountains, whose summits, reaching into the 

 clouds, give them an air of desolate grandeur. Their geolo- 

 gical formation is quite remarkable, seemingly nothing more 

 than colossal piles of broken bowlders and fragments of rock. 



