LAST VOYAGE OF CAPT. ROSS. 
493 
I 
that, on his return, he finds himself wholly unable to pay the 
men, whom he had engaged, and, therefore, that as the expedition 
was undertaken in a ship, they were the most proper persons to 
apply to, to defray the expenses of his Quixotism. It would, in¬ 
deed, have been a novel case, if the lords of the Admiralty, in an 
enthusiastic moment of admiration of the great achievements of 
Capt. Ross, had simultaneously put their hands in their pockets, 
and subscribed their thousands each, to assist him out of his pre¬ 
dicament; and we rather suspect, that if the relief had to come 
from that quarter, Capt. Ross would not have received an answer 
to his application in two days ; but the money, they advanced, 
was not their own, nor was it theirs to advance, without the 
sanction and authority of the Parliament of the country. They 
very coolly tell Capt. Ross, that they will not wait for the meet¬ 
ing of Parliament to sanction them in the grant; but their faces 
would have been something like the semaphore in length, at the 
top of their official residence, if Mr. Hume had caught his eye 
upon the item, in the expenditure of the Admiralty, paying to 
Capt. Ross, the sum of 4,580£. and had moved, that the lords of 
the Admiralty having paid so large a sum of the public money 
to a private individual, without the consent and approbation of 
Parliament, the said lords should be called upon to make up the 
sum advanced, out of their private purse, and in default of its not 
being produced from that quarter, that it should be stopped from 
their salaries. 
The foregoing strictures have not been passed, from any dis¬ 
position to cavil at the amount of the sum, which was given to 
the men, for they dearly earned every shilling that w^as paid; 
but we have considered it a flagrant instance of the disposal of 
the public money, without the sanction of those, to whom the 
people have delegated the appropriation of it, and which has 
perhaps been the means of impressing the belief upon the 
minds of the people of this country, that the seamen of the 
Victory had received their full due from the Admiralty; and that 
Capt. Ross was only telling the truth, when he declared, that 
he should be ashamed of himself, if he could entertain the 
