XXVI INTRODUCTION. 



coupled with the influential position he occupied in the 

 naval administration of the country, enabled him to 

 carry out his favourite enterprise, the renewal of Arctic 

 discovery. Hence between the years 1817 and 1845 

 an almost unbroken series of efforts were made by this 

 country to penetrate the frozen regions within the 

 Arctic or Antarctic circles. Connected with these 

 attempts the names of Parry, Franklin, and Eichard- 

 son, Back, John and James Eoss, Beechey and others 

 scarcely less eminent, have become famous ; and a band 

 of officers and seamen have been trained and educated 

 in a school, the stern necessities of which have been 

 instrumental in forming and fostering those qualities 

 of fortitude and habits of self-reliance and self-denial 

 which are certain to tell with effect at some period or 

 other of a seaman's career, and which no maritime 

 nation can afford to hold lightly. 



To enter into the briefest relation of the earlier 

 expeditions of the present century would be to repeat 

 what has already been frequently said ; nor is it neces- 

 sary, further than to remark that, with the exception of 

 Parry's attempt to reach the Pole in 1827, and James 

 Eoss's expedition to the Antarctic regions in 1840 and 

 following years, chiefly in the interests of the science 

 of terrestrial magnetism, they may nearly all be said to 

 have centred in the solution of the all-absorbing problem 

 — the discovery of a North-west passage. 



The last of these expeditions was the ill-fated one 

 under Franklin, which left these shores in the month 

 of May 1845 never to return. Just thirty years had 

 elapsed when in the same month in 1875 Polar research 

 was resumed by the despatch of the ' Alert ' and 

 1 Discovery ' on the voyage which is narrated in the 

 following pages by its distinguished commander. 



