TIIE BARRIER PACK. 
331 
north of it, across to Hackluyt Island, there extended 
a continuous barrier of ice. We had scarcely pene¬ 
trated beyond its margin. 
We had, in fact, reached the dividing pack of the 
two great open waters of Baffin’s Bay. The expe¬ 
rience of the whalers and of the expedition-ships that 
have traversed this region have made all of us fami¬ 
liar with that great expanse of open sea, to the north 
of Cape Dudley Diggs, which has received the name 
of the North Water. Combining the observations of 
Baffin, Ross, and Inglefield, we know that this some¬ 
times extends as far north as Littleton Island, em¬ 
bracing an area of ninety thousand square miles. The 
voyagers I have named could not, of course, be aware 
of the interesting fact that this water is divided, at 
least occasionally, into two distinct bodies; the one 
comprehended between Lancaster and Jones’s Sounds, 
the other extending from the point we had now 
reached to the upper pack of Smith’s Straits. But it 
was evident to all of our party that the barrier which 
now arrested us was made up of the ices which Jones’s 
Sound on the west and Murchison’s on the east had 
discharged and driven together. 
I may mention, as bearing on the physical geogra¬ 
phy of the region, that south of Cape Isabella the 
western shore is invested by a zone of unbroken ice. 
We encountered it when we were about twenty miles 
from the land. It followed the curves of three great 
indentations, whose bases were lined with glaciers 
rivalling those of Melville Bay. The bergs from them 
