as connected ivith the late Disasters in BaffitCs Bay. 141 



mendous crash, and overwhelming with its ruins the very spot 

 previously chosen for safety. 



During the present season, our whaling fleet encountered un- 

 paralled disasters in this bay. The storm blew furiously from 

 the south, driving before it congregated fields, floes and ice- 

 bergs. The mariner viewed the coming evil with dismay, and 

 placed his frail bark in the ice-haven he had cut in the field 

 that was fixed on his lee, beneath the further verge of which the 

 waves lay in slumber in the dark icy caves that skirt Melville 

 Bay. The ice was urged onward in wild disorder, with fear- 

 ful grinding noises, until the frozen masses coalescing, the pres- 

 sure became so great as to overcome every resistance. In 

 the midst of such agitations, many an unfortunate whaler was 

 destroyed : some were fairly pressed out of the water, the ice 

 piercing their sides, then recoiling, the vessel sank into the deer. 

 One ship was pushed under the bottom of another, yet they 

 both righted when the pressure subsided. In another case, the 

 ship was thrown on her beam ends, and the field in motion went 

 right over her — she was abandoned as a wreck, and, according 

 to the laws for regulating the whale-fishery, became the property 

 of any one. A gang of plunderers sawed her out, and, in de- 

 fiance of the authority of their masters, possessed themselves of 

 the rum qasks. They revelled in all the glories of inebriation, in 

 defiance of the rigour of a Greenland climate, until an end was 

 put to the strange scene by a change of weather and w^ant of 

 rum. 



There can be little doubt that Melville Bay is never free from 

 ice ; nay, it is highly probable that it is at all seasons as much in- 

 cumbered with it as any quarter of Baffin's Bay — a supposition 

 which is not only favoured by its geographical position, but is 

 also corroborated by the experience of our mariners. It will also 

 be remembered, that poor Sacheuse, who accompanied Captain 

 Ross, on being interrogated hy the Arctic Highlanders who in- 

 habit the regions north of Melville Bay, informed them he came 

 from the south, they disbelieved the assertion, saying there was 

 nothing but ice there. The ice in this bay was unusually 

 abundant during the present season ; and it is more than pro- 

 bable, that the southerly wind had prevailed for many months 

 previous, because the ice of last winter's formation was much 



