176 
LAST VOYAGE OF CAPT. ROSS. 
house of snow must necessarily be cold, it possesses indeed the 
nconvenience of being when first made, prejudicial to the eye- 
isight from its extreme whiteness, and this would be seriously felt 
by the Esquimaux, if the interior of their dwellings retained the 
original whiteness of the snow, but from its continued exposure 
to the smoke of their fire and other incidental causes, it assumes 
by degrees a colour approximating to a deep orange, and in 
some instances to a dark brown. A bed of snow does not carry 
with it any of those associations of warmth and comfort, which 
we generally attach to our place of repose, but the crew of the 
Victory had for a length of time no other bed, with only a skin 
or blanket interposing between their bodies and the snow, the 
principal benefit of which was the absorption of the moisture 
occasioned by the partial thawing of the snow from the heat of 
the recumbent body. It is the death bed of the Esquimaux, as 
well as his hymeneal couch, and so powerful is the force of 
habit, that it is a question whether he would exchange it for the 
bed of down of the monarch. 
Whilst some of the crew were employed in building the 
observatory, others were engaged in the erection of a wall of 
snow on the south side of the ship, which is represented in our 
plate of the Victory as she was frozen in, in Felix Harbour, 
The interval between the wall and the ship formed an avenue, in 
which the crew exercised themselves. 
To compare the Victory as she appeared in Felix Harbour to 
her appearance when off Woolwich, might be equal to comparing 
an antiquated dowager in the drawing room at night, with her 
false teeth, false hair, and false bosom profusely coloured with 
white and red, and then beholding her on the following morning, 
divested of all her fictitious ornaments, and appearing in her 
genuine character, a hideous, disgusting figure. Of the Victory 
at Woolwich it may be said 
I well remember how the ship lay yonder 
There was music on the festive deck, the wine 
like water pour’d, 
And they bravely drank success to her and to 
every man on board 
