288 ARCTIC EXPLORATIONS. 



stopped by impenetrable ice in latitude 73° 44" and in longitude 171° 

 30" west. Beturning to the southward, lie made another attempt fur- 

 ther to the westward, viz, on the meridian of 179° 52', but only suc- 

 ceeded in reaching the latitude of 73° 28', when he was again stopped 

 by the. formidable character of the ice. Berry made tidal observations 

 off Herald Island, and found that the flood tide set to the northwest and 

 the ebb in the opposite direction. At high and low water no current 

 was perceptible. 



All reports relative to the nature of the ice north of Bering Strait 

 coincide with regard to its massiveness and impenetrability. De Long 

 was beset in the same heavy ice. Collinson made several efforts to 

 penetrate the pack in various directions, but without success, and he 

 was at length compelled to return to the lead of open water that is 

 invariably found during the summer along the coast of Arctic America. 

 This navigable channel is due to the grounding of the heavy polar pack 

 in the shallow water that extends for a considerable distance off the 

 land. It was in this ice-free channel that Collinson and McClure sailed 

 along the entire American coast to the east, enabling the former to 

 reach the one hundred and fifth meridian of west longitude, thus over- 

 lapping Parry's discoveries to the westward by a considerable distance. 

 But both these navigators, skillful and daring as they were, were never 

 able to penetrate what we may fairly designate as the paheocrystic ice, 

 which they met when they attenrpted to push to the northward beyond 

 the seventy- sixth parallel of latitude. 



Collinson states that some of the floes were as much as 30 feet above 

 the water. Taking the ordinary flotation of ice as having seven-eighths 

 immersion, we thus have the thickness of the ice floes established as 

 over 200 feet. This was about the thickness of the ice, as estimated by 

 similar deductions, over which I traveled in 1876 to the north of Smith 

 Sound. Captain McClure encountered the same kind of ice. He 

 describes it as of stupendous thickness and in extensive floes from 7 

 to 8 miles in length, the surface not flat, but rugged with the accumu- 

 lated snow, frost, and thaws of centuries. Off the west coast of Banks 

 Land the surface of the oceanic ice floes was of an undulating nature, 

 100 feet from base to summit, rising in places as high as the lower 

 yards of the Investigator. The current experienced along the coast of 

 North America was invariably in a northeast and east-northeast direc- 

 tion. The current in Prince of Wales Strait is attributed by Collinson 

 to wind. 



No more important or interesting work associated with north polar 

 research can be conceived than the exploration of that vast unknown 

 region situated between Wrangel Island and Prince Patrick Island, 

 and the connection of Prince Patrick Island with Aldrich's Farthest in 

 Grant Land. But it is a work that can only be accomplished by a regu- 

 lar and systematic process, for all navigators who have approached this 

 rim of the unknown region — Collinson, McClure, Parry, McClintock, 



