OUR CHARTS. 
321 
afford to suffer from the occasional visits of gulls and 
other bipeds; for a locustrswarm of foragers might 
fatten without stint on their surplus abundance. 
We camped at this nursery of wild-fowl, and laid in 
four large India-rubber bags full, cleaned and rudely 
boned. Our boat was hauled up and refitted; and, the 
trial having shown us that she was too heavily laden 
for safety, I made a general reduction of our stores, 
and cached the surplus under the rocks. 
On Wednesday, the 19 th, we left Flagstaff Point, 
where we fixed our beacon last year; and stood W. 10° S. 
under full canvas. My aim was to take the channel 
obliquely at Littleton Island; and, making the drift-ice 
or the land to the southwest in the neighborhood of 
Cape Combermere, push on for Kent Island and leave 
a cairn there. 
I had the good fortune to get satisfactory meridian 
observations, as well as angular bearings between Cape 
Alexander and Flagstaff Point, and found, as our 
operations by theodolite had already indicated, that the 
entire coast-line upon the Admiralty Charts of my pre¬ 
decessor would have to be altered. 
Cape Isabella, the western headland of the strait, 
whose discovery, by-thc-way, is due rather to old Baffin 
than his follower Sir John Ross, bears W. 22° N. (solar) 
from Cape Alexander; its former location being some 
20° to the south of west. The narrowest part of 
Smith’s Straits is not, as has been considered, between 
these two capes, but upon the parallel of 78° 24', where 
Cape Isabella bears due west of Littleton Island, and 
Vol. I.—2] 
