PLAN OF OPERATIONS. 
IT 
tion recognised the same general laws as other penin¬ 
sulas having a southern trend. 
From the alternating altitudes of its mountain- 
ranges, continued without depression throughout a 
meridional line of nearly eleven hundred miles, I in¬ 
ferred that this chain must extend very far to the 
north, and that Greenland might not improbably ap¬ 
proach nearer the Pole than any other known land. 
Believing, then, in such an extension of this penin¬ 
sula, and feeling that the search for Sir John Franklin 
would be best promoted by a course that might lead 
most directly to the open sea of which I had inferred 
the existence, and that the approximation of the 
meridians would make access to the West as easy 
from Northern Greenland as from Wellington Channel, 
and access to the East far more easy,— feeling, too, 
that the, highest protruding headland would be most 
likely to afford some traces of the lost party,— I 
named, as the inducements in favor of my scheme,— 
1. Terra firma as the basis of our operations, ob¬ 
viating the capricious character of ice-travel. 
2. A due northern line, which, throwing aside the 
influences of terrestrial radiation, would lead soonest 
to the open sea, should such exist. 
3. The benefit of the fan-like abutment of land, on 
the north face of Greenland, to check the ice in the 
course of its southern or equatorial drift, thus obviating 
the great drawback of Parry in his attempts to reach 
the Pole by the Spitzbergen Sea. 
4. Animal life to sustain travelling parties. 
Vol. I.—2 
