314 NAVIGABLE N.W. PASSAGE. Chap. XVI. 



proportion of pack and of clear water at the 

 setting in of winter. Once to the southward 

 of the Tasmania Group, I think our chief diffi- 

 culty would have been overcome ; and south 

 of Cape Yictoria I doubt whether any farther 

 obstruction would have been experienced, as 

 but little, if any, ice remained. The natives 

 told us the ice went away, and left a clear 

 sea every year. As our discoveries show the 

 Victoria Strait to be but little more than 20 

 miles wide, the ice pressed southward through 

 so narrow a space could hardly have prevented 

 our crossing to Yictoria Land, and Cambridge 

 Bay, the wintering place reached by Collinson, 

 from the ivest. 



No one who sees that portion of Victoria 

 Strait which lies between King William's 

 Island and Yictoria Land, as we saw it, could 

 doubt of there being but one way of getting a 

 ship through it, that way being the extremely 

 hazardous one of drifting through in the pack. 



The wide channel between Prince of Wales' . 

 Land and Yictoria Land admits a vast and con- 

 tinuous stream of very heavy ocean-formed ice 

 from the N.W., which presses upon the western 

 face of King William's Island, and chokes up 

 Yictoria Strait in the manner I have just de- 

 scribed. I do not think the North- West Passage 



