816 
LAST VOYAGE OF CAPT. ROSS. 
duration, but like the passenger in the mail coach, who not being 
able to sleep himself, was determined that none of his fellow 
passengers should enjoy any rest, their senik was no sooner over, 
than they thought it not possible to show their respect for the kind 
treatment which they had received, in a more effective manner 
than by singing a duet, which made the sailors start up one by 
one from their hammocks, wondering where such unearthly 
bowlings came from. In vain the sailors roared out. avast! 
avast! wider and wider the singers strained their throats, and 
shriller and shriller came the sounds upon their startled ears. A 
valuable acquisition would they have proved to join in the 
matins of a pack of monks, and if, as those same monks tell us, 
the angels of heaven are delighted with the harmony of their 
canticles, tenfold would their rapture have increased, if the deep 
sonorous voices of Narlook and Ikmalik had mingled in the 
pious strains. Not an angel would have kept his place in hea¬ 
ven, but they would have been seen sliding down the rainbows 
in crowds, to enjoy the harmonious sounds of the Esquimaux 
Lablaches. It is sometimes a very difficult task to stop a person, 
who is determined in his own mind to exhaust his powers of 
cantation, but it may have happened that the Esquimaux unable 
to understand the meaning of the exclamations of the sailors, 
construed them in an opposite sense, and considered them as 
direct indications of their applause, and a kind of flattering 
encore for the repetition of the duet. 
There is however one never failing method of stopping the 
singing propensity of an individual, when it threatens to imi¬ 
tate eternity so far, as to have no end to it; and that is, to pre¬ 
sent him with an ice ora sillabub, which by giving his mastica¬ 
ting powers something to do, grants a respite to his cantatory 
ones. Of the former, the sailors of the Victory had an abundance 
to give to their singing friends, but the great question was, 
whether they would prefer a mouthful of it to a sudden inter¬ 
ruption of their duet. An English sailor however is seldom 
wanting in ingenuity in the discovery of a remedy for any evil 
that may suddenly come upon him, and finding that no imine- 
mediate prospect presented itself of the singers arriving at the 
