ARCTIC VOYAGES. 
67 
and Long. 117° 10' W., about thirty miles from the waters of that series of straits which, 
under the names of Melville, Barrow, and Lancaster, communicate with Baffin’s Bay. 
At this tantalising distance, the ship ceased to drift, and the ice appeared to have reached 
a point beyond which some unknown cause would not allow it to proceed. The heavy 
pack of Melville Strait lying across the head of the channel was supposed to be the rea¬ 
son of the ice of Prince of Wales Strait ceasing to move on to the north-east; and the 
impassable nature of the pack in the same direction, in the following year, confirmed this 
hypothesis.”— Osborn, p. 114. 
The set of the flood tide in the Prince of Wales Strait, almost up to 
its northern extremity, was from the south , and belonged, therefore, to 
what we have called the Polar Pacific Tide. 
“ The set of the currents or tides had long been an anxious question with Captain 
McClure : the tide-pole in thirty fathoms water was not a sure guide: but, so far as its 
help and twelve months’ observation enabled him to form an idea, the flood-tide came 
from the south up the strait, the rise and fall being about three feet at spring-tides, 
and little, if anything, at the neaps” — Osborn, p.®200. 
In the August of the following year, 1851, the Investigator again 
failed to force her passage through the ice-blocked “head of the tide” 
which occupies the northern extremity of Prince of Wales Strait. 
“ The ‘ Investigator’ was again beset in the ice, and with slight intermission continued 
so until the 15th of August, during which time she drifted about two miles per diem to 
the north-east with it, and eventually reached 73° 43' 43" N. latitude, and longitude 
115° 32' 30" W., in which position she remained at the tantalising distance of twenty- 
five miles from the waters of Barrow’s Strait! 
“ Further than that, no effort could advance the ship, and there were occasional sets 
of the ice to the south-west, with N. E. winds, which threatened to send them back from 
whence they came. The young ice at nights had already begun to form, the sun again 
set, and darkness had commenced, and Captain M‘Clure knew that his days of naviga¬ 
tion were every day diminishing. If he could push into the pack of Barrow’s Strait, 
with a prospect of drifting with it to the eastward for Lancaster Sound, he w r as prepared 
to do so ; but it would be folly merely to get entangled in it at the entrance of Prince of 
Wales Strait, and be swept back again to winter, in 1851-52, in the same place he had 
occupied last year. Impressed with this feeling, it was with no small anxiety, when 
about noon on the 16th of August, the fog having lifted, that he proceeded to take a 
careful survey of the ice ahead, before he decided upon launching into it, or adopting 
some other course by which to carry his ship through the North-West Passage in safety ; 
and to perfect upon one line at any i-ate the search for his missing brother officers. He 
says :—‘ I observed the ice closely packed, extending across from one side of the Strait to 
the other ;’ it formed an unbroken line without a prospect of successful passage through 
it for a sailing ship; and then he immediately determined, with that decision which 
formed the secret of his wonderful success, to bear up, go round the south end of Banks’ 
Land, and endeavour, by passing to the westward, to reach Melville Island from that 
direction.”— Osborn, p. 202. 
As if to demonstrate the impossibility of effecting a passage through 
the head of the tide, in a narrow polar strait, snch as that of the Prince 
of Wales, a fortnight later the “Enterprise,” under Collinson, also failed 
in her efforts to pass through the same channel into Barrow’s Strait; and 
it is well worthy of remark that it was only the ten or twenty miles at 
each side of the head of the tide that presented any difficulty, as both 
ships found it easy to sail up and down the Strait as far north as the 
Princess Boyal Islands. In that portion of the Strait the ice was kept 
