CHAPTER XXII. 
August 28. Strange enough, during the night, 
Captain Austin, of her majesty’s search squadron, with 
his flag-ship the Resolute, entered the same little in- 
dentation in which five of us were moored before. His 
steam-tender, the Pioneer, grounded OS' the point of 
Beechy Island, and is now in sight, canted over by the 
ice nearly to her beam ends. He has come to us not 
of design, hut under the irresistible guidance of the 
ice. We are now seven vessels within hailing dis- 
tance, not counting Captain Ommanney’s, imbedded 
in the field to the westward. 
“ I called this morning on Sir John Ross, and had a 
long talk with him. He said that, as far back as 1847, 
anticipating the ‘ detention’ of Sir John Franklin — I 
use his own word — he had volunteered his services for 
an expedition of retrieve, asking for the purpose four 
small vessels, something like our own ; hut no one list- 
ened to him. Volunteering again in 1848, he was 
told that his nephew’s claim to the service had re- 
ceived a recognition ; whereupon his own was with- 
drawn. ‘ I told Sir John,’ said Ross, ‘ that my own ex- 
perience in these seas proved that all these sounds and 
inlets may, by the caprice or even the routine of sea- 
sons, be closed so as to prevent any egress, and that a 
missing or shut-off party must have some means of 
falling hack. It was thus I saved myself from the 
abandoned Victory by a previously constructed house 
for wintering, and a boat for temporary refuge.’ All 
this, he says, he pressed on Sir John Franklin before 
