OF A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE. 
165 
made extremely brilliant by the reflection of the sun’s rays, from irinume- 1820 . 
rable minute spiculse of snow floating in the atmosphere. 
qfr, a circle having a radius from the sun, of 45°, strongly prismatic about 
the points / q r, and faintly so all round. 
m n, a small arch of an inverted circle, strongly prismatic, and having its 
centre apparently in the zenith. 
r p, q o, arches of large circles, very strongly prismatic, which could only 
be traced to p and o ; but on that part of the horizontal circle t u, which was 
directly opposite to the sun, there appeared a confused white light, which had 
occasionally the appearance of being caused by the intersection of large arches 
coinciding with a prolongation of r p, and q o. 
The above phenomenon continued during the greater part of the afternoon ; 
but at six P.M., the distance between d and e increased considerably, and 
what before appeared an arch, x, d, v, now assumed the appearance given in 
fig. 12, plate 287, of Brewster’s Encyclopedia , resembling horns, and so 
described in the article “ Halo” of that work. At 90° from the sun, on 
each side of it, and at an altitude of 30° to 50°, there now appeared also a 
very faint arch of white light, which sometimes seemed to form a part of 
the circles q o, r p; and sometimes we thought they turned the opposite 
way. In the outer large circle, we now observed two opposite and corre- 
sponding spots y, y, more strongly prismatic than the rest, and the inverted 
arch m,f, n, was now much longer than before, and resembled a beautiful 
rainbow. 
The protracted length of the winter began now to make us more than usually Thur.13. 
impatient, and to create in us reasonable apprehensions lest our escape from 
Winter Harbour should unavoidably be postponed to a period too late for the 
accomplishment of those sanguine hopes, with which the last year’s success 
had induced us to flatter ourselves. The extraordinary degree of cold which 
continued day after day was such as we had certainly not anticipated ; and 
when, at this period, with the sun above the horizon for seventeen hours 
out of the four and twenty, the thermometer was still occasionally falling as 
low as — 31°, which it did at four this morning, it must be confessed that 
our future prospects of advancement began to wear a very unpromising 
aspect. It may be imagined, also, with what anxiety we watched for the 
first appearance of a thaw, both on shore and upon the ice round the ships, 
in neither of which had any such appearances yet become perceptible, except 
that here and there, where the snow happened to lie very thin upon the 
