178 THE PARRY ISLANDS 



Collinson took his ship much nearer to Parry's course 

 on the east side ; and Franklin, by linking up with 

 Dease and Simpson over the ice by way of Victoria 

 Strait, had previously found another of the possible 

 passages, as shown by Collinson's voyage to Cambridge 

 Bay. But surely what was done by M'Clure, and by 

 Collinson in his northerly cruise, was to see where ships 

 could pass when there was no ice in the way, which 

 was no more than had been done by Parry, who had 

 taken his ship within sight of both their farthests, and 

 would have sailed into the Beaufort Sea had not the 

 pack forbidden it. It was Parry, in fact, who dis- 

 covered the main road, the route by Prince of Wales 

 Strait, like that by Peel Sound taken by Franklin and 

 successfully accomplished by Amundsen, being only 

 one of the many by-roads leading off along his course. 

 His famous voyage to Melville Island was due to the 

 influence of Sir John Barrow. Barrow, to whom more 

 than any other man this country owes its position in 

 Arctic story, was born in a small thatched cottage at 

 Dragley Beck, near Ulverston, in North Lancashire, in 

 1764, and, in a remarkable course of promotion by 

 merit, became second secretary of the Admiralty for 

 forty years under twelve or thirteen different naval 

 administrations, Whig and Tory; being so unmistakably 

 the right man in the right place that he was only dis- 

 pensed with once on a change of First Lords and 

 then was reinstated the next year. When he was 

 seventeen he was given the opportunity of a voyage 

 in a Greenland whaler, which he accepted, and that 

 was his only Arctic experience ; but even when with 

 Macartney in China and South Africa, he kept up 



