258 
LAST VOYAGE OF CAPT. ROSS. 
whose souls nature had infused a considerable portion of Parnassian 
fire, and who have immortalized in hexameters and alexandrines 
the loves of Narlook and Ikrnalik, and all their own great and 
glorious achievements, their conquests and their victories over 
the hosts of seals and walruses, who very justly considered the 
human bipeds as base intruders on their legitimate domain, which 
had been their undisputed right, from the time that their great 
progenitors sprung out of the ground before Adam, and received 
from him their name; on which, they steered their course down 
the Euphrates; found their way, by some means, into the 
Euxine, and thence through the Hellespont into the Mediter¬ 
ranean, where after stopping for a short time to view an erup¬ 
tion of Mount Etna, which they found rather too hot for them, 
they plunged through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Atlantic, 
and thence shaping their course direct northwest, (some power 
of Heaven being their pilot,) arrived in safety in Baffin’s Bay, 
where they determined to domiciliate themselves, and proceeded 
to carry into effect the great mandate, which on their departure 
from the river Pison, was given to them by Adam, to increase and 
multiply.—And verily the descendants of that same Adam, found 
on their arrival in the adopted country of the seal family, that the 
said mandate had been fulfilled in an extraordinary degree. That 
George IV. or any other monarch, of whom they had never heard 
before, had any right to take possession of their country, that they 
had held for the period of about 4000 years, (proving thereby 
irrefutably that the family of the Seals in point of antiquity is 
superior to that of the Guelphs,) and which they had determined 
to keep to all perpetuity, was in their opinion so contrary to 
every principle of justice, that it was no wonder that wars and 
battles ensued, which roused the fire of the poetic geniuses of 
the Hecla and the Fury, and which like the celebration of Blen¬ 
heim by Addison, or of Waterloo by Walter Scott, have been 
versified by them with a talent which an Addison or a Scott, 
especially the latter could never reach, for of the effusion of the 
latter poet it was said—. 
How prostrate lie the heaps of slain, 
On Waterloo’s immortal plain; 
