356 THE ICE-BELT. 



Polar waters into Baffin Bay through the Parry Ar- 

 chipelago, crosses thence to Greenland, from Green- 

 land to Spitsbergen, and from Spitzbergen to Nova 

 Zembla, — thus investing the Pole in an uninter- 

 rupted land-clinging belt of ice, more or less broken 

 as well in winter as in summer, and the fragments 

 ever moving to and fro, though never widely separat- 

 ing, forming a barrier against which all the arts and 

 energies of man have not hitherto prevailed. 



If the reader would further pursue the inquiry, let , 

 him place one leg of a pair of dividers on the map 

 near the North Pole (say in latitude 86°, longitude 

 160° W.), and inscribe a circle two thousand miles in 

 diameter, and he will have touched the margin of the 

 land and the mean line of the ice-belt throughout its 

 wide circuit, and have covered an area of more than 

 three millions of square miles. 



Although this ice-belt has not been broken through, 

 it has been penetrated in many places, and its south- 

 ern margin has been followed, partly along the waters 

 formed near the land by the discharging rivers of the 

 Arctic water- sheds of Asia and America, and partly 

 by working through the ice which is always more or 

 less loosened by the summer. It was in this manner 

 that various navigators have attempted the north- 

 west passage ; and it was after following the coast 

 line from Behring Strait to Banks Land, and then 

 pushing through the broken ice that Sir Robert Mc- 

 Clure finally succeeded in effecting this long-sought- 

 for passage — not, however, by carrying his ship com- 

 pletely through, but by traveling over the winter ice 

 three hundred miles to Wellington Channel, whence 

 he returned home through Baffin Bay in a ship that 

 had come from the eastward. And it was in this 



