PORT KENNEDY 211 



pack and steamed to the eastward amid the most 

 perilous of ice experiences. Most men would have 

 returned and tried again; not so M'Cliatock. He 

 boldly ran up the Greenland coast as if nothing had 

 happened and, making good deficiencies, resumed his 

 voyage. Soon after leaving Sanderson's Hope the 

 Fox was nearly wrecked near Buchan Island, remain- 

 ing on a rock until the tide rose again to set her free. 

 After calling at Beechey Island, M'Clintock followed 

 Franklin's track down Peel Sound until stopped by the 

 pack, when he retraced his course and tried Prince 

 Regent Inlet, reaching Bellot Strait on the 21st of 

 August. At Port Kennedy in this famous waterway 

 which is like a Greenland fiord, about twenty miles long 

 and scarcely a mile wide at its narrowest part, the water 

 four hundred feet deep within a quarter of a mile of 

 its northern shore he passed the winter. 



On the 1st of March he reached by sledge the Magnetic 

 Pole and fell in with four of the Eoothian Eskimos, 

 who, at the cost of a needle each, built him a snow hut 

 in an hour, in which they all spent the night. " Per- 

 haps," says M'Clintock, "the records of architecture do 

 not furnish another instance of a dwelling-house so 

 cheaply constructed ! " Halting at Cape Victoria the 

 Eskimos came up from their village close by with a 

 number of small relics of the lost expedition. Return- 

 ing to the Fox after a journey of four hundred and 

 twenty statute miles in which the survey of the west 

 coast of Boothia was completed, everything was made 

 ready for three long sledge journeys of two sledges each, 

 the captain taking that for Montreal Island, and giving 

 Hobson the best chance of promotion by sending him 



