THE DREADED MELVILLE BAY. 97 



At Upernavik, the last Danish station at which the Pandora stopped, and that only 

 long- enough to obtain some dogs, they learned that the English expedition had sailed thence 

 on the 22nd of July. In north latitude 74 they had a glimpse of the grandest of 

 Greenland's glaciers, which is described as a great inclined plane, seventy or eighty miles 

 long, extending back to the interior in one vast icy slope. Immense as was this field of 

 ice, they knew that it was nothing but a small corner of the great, lone, silent, dreary 

 world beyond. Now they entered the dreaded Melville Bay, which is in some years 



THE MONUMENT TO BELLOT. 



never free from ice. It is often only towards the end of August that ships can get through 

 it. Here, in the middle of that month, the little steam yacht Fox, of McClintock's memorable 

 expedition, was caught in the ice, carried down Baffin's Bay and Davis Straits, only to be 

 freed 242 days afterwards by a miracle. The fact of a bear swimming in the sea betokened 

 that ice was not far off, and so it proved. It was not, however, at first very formidable, 

 consisting only of thin, loose floes, that offered little resistance to the sharp prow of the 

 Pandora. On the evening of the 19th of August they were at the Carey Islands, where a 

 bootless search was made for a cairn of stones believed to have been erected by Captain Nares. 

 They found, however, two cairns erected by a whaler in 1867, in one of which he had 

 left half a bottle of rum, which, having undergone eight successive freezings, had become 

 as mild as fine old Rhine wine. It is needless to say that the whaling captain's health 

 93 



