502 THE PROGRESS OF MARITIME DISCOVERY. 
able to join this valuable friend, and the following year brought 
them safely back to England. 
I pass over Parry’s second and third voyages, undertaken in 
the years 1821 and 1824, which were consumed in fruitless 
endeavours to penetrate westward; the first through some un- 
known channel to the north of Hudson’s Bay, the second through 
Prince Regent’s Inlet ; but his last attempt to reach the North 
Pole, by boat and sledge-travelling over the ice, is of too novel 
and daring a character to remain unnoticed. His hopes of 
success were founded on Scoresby’s descriptions, who had seen 
ice-fields so free from either fissure or hummock, that, had they 
not been covered with snow, a coach might have been driven 
many leagues over them in a direct line, without obstruction or 
danger; but when Parry reached the ice-fields to the north of 
Spitzbergen he found them of a very different nature, composed 
of loose rugged masses, which rendered travelling over them 
extremely irksome and slow. 
The strong flat-bottomed boats—amphibious constructions, 
half sledge, half canoe,—expressly built for an amphibious 
journey over a region where solid ice was expected to alternate 
with pools of water, had thus frequently to be unloaded, in order 
to be raised over the intervening blocks or mounds, and repeated 
journeys backward and forward over the same ground were the 
necessary consequences. In some places the ice took the form 
of sharp pointed crystals, which cut the boots like penknives; in 
others, sixteen or eighteen inches of soft snow made the work 
of boat-dragging both fatiguing and tedious. Sometimes the 
men were obliged, in dragging the boats, to crawl on all-foirs, 
to make any progress at all, and one day, when heavy rain 
melted the surface of the ice, four hours of vigorous effort 
accomplished only half a mile. 
Yet in spite of all these obstacles they toiled cheerfully on 
and on, until at length the discovery was made, that while they 
were apparently advancing towards the Pole, the ice-field on 
which they journeyed was moving to the south, and thus render- 
ing all their exertions fruitless. Yet though disappointed in 
his great hope of planting his country’s standard on that unat- 
tainable goal, Parry had the glory of reaching the highest 
latitude (82° 45) ever attained by man. 
3efore this adventurous voyage, Franklin, Richardson, and 
