THE MAGNETIC NORTH POLE 201 



including the crossing of the upper part of James Ross 

 Strait, the discovery of Matty Island and the north- 

 east coast of King William Land from Cape Landon, 

 opposite Cape Porter where Ross, as usual, missed a 

 strait westward to capes Franklin and Jane Franklin, 

 within sight of which in the days that were coming, 

 by one of those remarkable coincidences so frequent in 

 the north, the Erebus and Terror were to meet their 

 fate. 



The one conspicuous triumph of the expedition was 

 the journey of James Ross to the site of the Magnetic 

 North Pole, which he found on the western coast of 

 Boothia on the 1st of June, 1831. In the younger 

 Ross's own words, " the land at this place is very low 

 near the coast, but it rises into ridges of fifty or sixty 

 feet high about a mile inland. We could have wished 

 that a place so important had possessed more of mark 

 or note. It was scarcely censurable to regret that there 

 was not a mountain to indicate a spot to which so 

 much of interest must ever be attached ; and I could 

 even have pardoned any one among us who had been 

 so romantic or absurd as to expect that the magnetic 

 pole was an object as conspicuous and mysterious as 

 the fabled mountain of Sinbad, that it even was a 

 mountain of iron, or a magnet as large as Mont Blanc. 

 But Nature had here erected no monument to denote 

 the spot which she had chosen as the centre of one of 

 her great and dark powers ; and where we could do 

 little ourselves towards this end, it was our business to 

 submit, and to be content in noting by mathematical 

 numbers and signs, as with things of far more import- 

 ance in the terrestrial system, what we could but ill 



