LAST VOYAGE OF CAPT. ROSS, 
295 
ous, difficult and uncertain of any other of equal extent within the 
seas of the Arctic Regions. The chief cause of these difficulties is 
now sufficiently obvious, but it must be admitted that the 
position in which the Victory was placed both in her first and 
second winter harbour, was not one in which much information 
could be acquired by the force or direction of the currents, to 
which so much importance is attached in the navigation of 
unknown seas, and especially where their extreme termination is 
a disputed point. We know that our old navigators invariably 
found a strong current setting down the channel, called Rowe’s 
Welcome, along the coast of America into Hudson’s Bay, from 
thence through the Strait to the westward, carrying with it 
whole fields of ice, together with those immense masses 
known by the name of icebergs, conveying them along the 
coast of Labrador, across the banks of Newfoundland, and the 
tail of the Gulph Stream, and never quitting the American side 
of the Atlantic, although westerly gales of wind are almost as 
constant as the Gulph Stream; where then originates this per¬ 
petual motion of the sea to the southward ? certainly not in Baf¬ 
fin’s Bay, where no current was found to exist, nor in Hudson’s 
Bay, into which it is poured down from the northward; nor in 
Lancaster Sound, where little or none was found ; it can therefore 
only originate in some open sea to the westward, and this 
circumstance has been the great subject of speculation amongst 
all navigators from the earliest period. The first discoverers 
seem to have been aware of the cause of the currents originating 
in a sea to the westward, and concluded that they flowed round 
the north east point of America, which they imagined was not 
far distant from Rowe’s Welcome, and accordingly their 
endeavours were directed, but in vain, to discover that point. 
Capt. Parry ascertained the important fact that a perpetual cur¬ 
rent sets through the Strait, which divides the continent from a 
large island to the northward of it; so strong indeed, that it brings 
with it out of the polar sea, and wedges into the strait, such im¬ 
mense fields of ice, as to render a passage through the strait utterly 
hopeless, for no sooner does a disruption (sometimes of a square 
mile or more in extent) take place at the eastern entrance, than 
