ARCTIC VOYAGES. 
69 
favour a further advance, lest we should not succeed in procuring another so eligible as 
it was considered to be. At noon all work was completed, and our crew, after nearly 
thirty hours’ continuous labour, were allowed to rest for the remainder of the day. 
“We were-thus doomed to spend a second winter in the ice, after all the anticipations 
we had formed of reaching Melville Island; and, I must say, it w^gs a sad and bitter 
disappointment to us all. Entering this bay was the fatal error of our voyage. This 
opinion I formed at the time, personally expressed it, and recorded; it in my Journal; 
therefore I could not be, in any degree, influenced by subsequent events ; and, that the 
decision then arrived at, of entering this bay, was a hasty one, was fully established by 
its insults. 
“ We had, previously to our entering this bay, made no attempt to reach Point Back, 
although an open sea was before us. The reported existence of shoals (which we did 
not examine), and the appearance of the ice, setting down on it from the northward, 
caused it to be considered not prudent to do so. Nor did we make any attempt to reach 
the pack edge, with a view of pushing through its loose ice, and endeavouring to get 
further to the north-east. Although the wind had become more northerly, and was 
bringing the ice down, it was nothing more than what is termed loose sailing ice 
in our immediate neighbourhood, through which a ship might for some distance have 
worked her way, as the sea is at this time of the year clearer of such impediments than 
at any other; more may, therefore, be accomplished in a few days than in as many 
months at any earlier period. By doing so we would have got fairly within the influence 
of the current setting to the eastward through Banks’ Strait, and would have been fur¬ 
ther aided by the prevailing winds from the north-west. Although we might have been 
temporarily beset, we should still have been borne in the direction we wished to go, and, 
as the pack opened out, have got into one of its numerous lanes of water, that would have 
led us for Melville Island, then distant little more than fifty miles. Or, had we failed in 
doing this, we, might have been drifted such a distance to the eastward as to render our 
getting through, on its breaking up in the following season, a matter Of still greater cer¬ 
tainty. Wintering in the pack all Arctic navigators had hitherto viewed with the 
utmost dread; and though I admit it to be perilous and dangerous, our experience of 
the previous winter was satisfactory evidence that it could be done with safety; and this 
was, I believe, the first time the experiment had been made. Great and imminent as 
were the dangers which then threatened us, as well as in the late terrible passage we 
had just made, we had then become so accustomed to danger, and to encounter fearlessly 
the worst aspect this element could assume, that we viewed, without apprehension, the 
risks and chances of another winter in the pack, had it been so decreed—so anxious 
were we to make the North-West Passage in the ship, and bring the 1 Investigator’ in 
safety to England. I am, therefore, firm]} 7 convinced, that had we not entered this bay, 
but boldly pushed into the pack, it would have led to a consummation of all our ardent 
hopes and wishes. 
“ There are few states of mind from which one cannot draw some degree of consola¬ 
tion, however great may be the disappointment or deep the regret; and we then drew 
largely on ours. It was, however, satisfactory to reflect that, although the ship had 
only been actually under weigh for five days during the season, we had prosecuted the 
search over a wide extent of coast line, and added largely to geographical science by estab¬ 
lishing the insular character of Baring Island, besides discovering a second ‘ North-West 
Passage’ between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, in a direct line through Banks’ Strait, 
in a voyage that stands unparalleled as the most perilous ever made in the Polar Sea. 
“ We, therefore, entered this bay,* disappointed as we felt in doing so, with a firm 
reliance on Providence that we might be enabled to leave on the following season in a 
state of as great efficiency as we had then entered it.”—• Armstrong , p. 461. 
We must leave to others more competent than ourselves to decide 
between these conflicting statements; hut we feel bound to add that 
* “ The bay subsequently received the name of Mercy, in remembrance of the perils 
we had escaped; but some amongst us not inappropriately said, it ought to have been 
so called from the fact that it would have been a mercy had we never entered it .” 
