50 TRANSACTIONS iSgg-'oo 



John Ross's second in command, was, as we have said, W. 

 E. Parry. As Parry did not concur in the view held by Ross 

 about the passages, reported by Baffin, being mere inlets, but 

 beheved that they were straits hy which a North West Passage 

 could be found, he was appointed to command another expedi- 

 tion, which sailed in the leafy month of May, 1819, and was 

 formed of the "Hecla" and the "Griper" with a hundred men 

 on board. With these vessels he entered Baffin Baj^ and passed 

 through Lancaster Sound, the continuation of which he named 

 Barrow Strait. He also saw and named Wellington Channel, 

 after the Iron Duke, then Master-General of the Ordnance. 

 Pressing onward he saw and named several Islands after his 

 much loved western counties, for he was a Somerset man. On 

 the 4th September the ships crossed the Meridian of 110° west of 

 Greenwich in latitude 74^44', by which fact the crews became 

 entitled to the reward of ^'5,000 offered to those first reaching 

 that meridian. To do honor to the joyful event, a bluff head- 

 land, off which the announcement was made, received from the 

 men the name of "Bounty Cape." 



He came at length, after a voyage of 300 miles from Wel- 

 lington Channel, to land which he named Melville, in honour of 

 lyord Melville, First lyord of the Admiralty, who, to judge of 

 him by the frequency with which his title appears as a place- 

 name (there are ten or a dozen places bearing his name) must 

 have been a man whose heart was in the right place. Here 

 further progress was stopped by that impenetrable polar pack 

 which seems to surround the Archipelago, and was compelled to 

 winter in a harbor on the south coast of Melville Island, called 

 by him Winter Island. Parry was the first of the "hardy 

 English navigators' ' whose ' 'westerly sailings' ' we are following, 

 to winter in our north country. There they wintered in a dark 

 silence, broken only by the loud resounding blows which the 

 hammer of intense cold now and then strikes upon the beams 

 and sides of their ships — otherwise a silence so profound that one 

 might easily fancy he could hear the clash of constant battle 

 kept up in his veins and arteries — those great military roads 

 leading from and to the citadel of the heart — as the microbes, 

 friendly and unfriendly to human life, make of his body a 

 battle-field, in which the prize is his continuance in health or his 

 removal to the silence of the tomb. When the long Arctic night 



