OF A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE. 
275 
a latitude, had become a fishing station like that on the opposite or Green- 1820. 
land shore, and the circumstance of our meeting so few whales in Sir James 
Lancaster’s Sound this season, was at once accounted for by supposing what, 
indeed, we afterwards found to be the case, that the fishing-ships had 
been there before us, and had, for a time, scared them from that ground. 
The piece of blubber we had picked up was also sufficiently accounted for in 
a similar manner. 
In standing in-shore at night, we got into deep water, between the banks 
and the land, having no soundings with sixty to ninety fathoms of line, where 
we lay-to till day-light. 
It was so squally on the morning of the 5th, that we could scarcely carry Tues. 5. 
our double-reefed topsails, while, as we afterwards learned from the fishing- 
ships, which were in sight at day-light, there was scarcely a breath of 
wind at a few leagues’ distance from the land. In running to the south- 
ward, we passed, in the course of the forenoon, a headland, which is re- 
markable as appearing from the northward exactly like three round-topped 
islands, for which they had been taken on the voyage of 1818 ; but they 
are only small hills situated on comparatively low land, which commences 
from hence to the southward next the sea. We coasted this low shore, as 
we had done in the preceding voyage, at the distance of two or three miles, 
having from twenty-three to twenty-nine fathoms’ water. We here met with 
another of our fishing-ships, which proved to be the Lee, of Hull, Mr. Wil- 
liamson master ; from whom we learned, among other events of a public 
nature which were altogether new to us, the public calamity which England 
had sustained in the death of our late venerable and beloved Sovereign, and 
also the death of His Royal Highness the Duke of Kent. Mr. Williamson, 
among others, had succeeded in getting across the ice to this coast as high 
as the latitude of 73°, and had come down to this part in pursuit of the 
fish. One or two of the ships had endeavoured to return home by running down 
this coast, but had found the ice so close about the latitude of 69|°, as to 
induce most of the others to sail to the northward, in order to get back in 
the same way that they came. Mr. Williamson also reported his having, 
a day or two before, met with some Esquimaux in the inlet named the 
River Clyde in 1818, which was just to the southward of us. Considering 
it a matter of some interest to communicate with these people, who had, 
probably, not been before visited by Europeans, and that it might, at the 
same time, be useful to examine the inlet, I bore up, as soon as I 
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