THE GULLS 235 



by W. E. Parry's second expedition in search of a north-west passage. 

 It was named (almost inadvertently) Larus roseus by William Mac- 

 Gillivray in 1824 on one of the two specimens brought back by the 

 expedition, and Larus Rossii by J. Richardson in 1832 (Swainson and 

 Richardson, 1832). Richardson named it after James Clark Ross, who 

 was one of Parry's lieutenants and who found it. MacGillivray gave 

 it the English name of Ross's rosy gull, Richardson the cuneate- 

 tailed gull. Moreover J. C. Ross, once more with that prince of polar 

 explorers, Parry, was the first to find it in its real autumn and winter 

 home, the sea-ice of the Polar Basin; he saw it north of Spitsbergen 

 on the astonishing attempt to reach the Pole across the pack in July 

 1827. 



Fifty years later Ross's gull was still only a legend in most parts 

 of the world and less than a dozen specimens existed. Nobody had 

 seen a flock, nobody (even at that time in Greenland) had seen or 

 heard of a nest. It is possible to imagine the interest, then, when the 

 American explorers in G. W. DeLong's Jeannette (imprisoned in the 

 ice on 6 September 1879 and slowly drifting from the neighbourhood 

 of Wrangel Island to that of the northernmost New Siberian Islands) 

 met largish numbers of these very rare gulls over the east Siberian 

 pack-ice. R. L. Newcomb, the naturalist, shot eight of them in 

 October 1879. When the ill-fated ship foundered on 12-13 June 1881 

 not far from Henrietta Island, the expedition salved its collections and 

 journeyed in the ship's boats across the ice and 'leads' via Bennett- 

 Island through the main New Siberian Islands across the Laptev 

 Sea to the Siberian mainland at the Lena Delta. DeLong and many 

 others died on the way; and all suffered terribly: but Newcomb kept 

 three of his precious skins of Ross's gulls under his shirt during the 

 long journey. 



Between 3 and 8 August 1894, almost exactly between the Lena 

 Delta and the Pole, Nansen shot eight rosy gulls from the Fram^ more 

 than ten months frozen in the pack. After Nansen had left the Fram^ 

 and when he was (without at the time knowing it) about thirty miles 

 north-east of Hvidtenland, the north-eastern group of the Franz Josef 

 Archipelago, he and his companion Johansen began to see single 

 adult rosy gulls on 11 July 1895, and continued to do so until they 

 passed beyond this particular group on 8 August; sometimes the 

 birds were in small flocks. They saw no more after that, as they 

 travelled west and south through Franz Josef Land; indeed F. G. 

 Jackson who by chance (!) encountered them, and gave them hospitality 



