ject of deep interest and wonder to see this migration of
animal life, and I determined, directly leisure would enable me, to
search the numerous books with which we were well stored, to endeavour
to satisfy my mind with some reasonable theory, founded upon the
movements of bird and fish, as to the existence of a Polar ocean or a
Polar continent.

A sudden turn of tide, which floated the ice that had for some hours
been aground on Point Innis and Cape Spencer, and carried it out of
Wellington Channel, which favourable tide I therefore conjectured to be
the flood, enabled the "Pioneer" and "Resolute" to start across
Wellington Channel, towards Barlow Inlet.

Northward of us, ran, almost in a straight line, east and west, the
southern edge of a body of ice, which we then imagined, in our
ignorance, to be _fixed_, extending northward,--aye, to the very pole;
for in the rumour of it being a mere fiord, or gulf, I had no belief,
nor any one else who crossed it in our ships. The day was beautifully
clear, and a cold, hard sky enabled us to see the land of North
Somerset most distinctly, though thirty to forty miles distant; and yet
nothing appeared resembling land in the northern part of Wellington
Channel. More than one of us regretted the prospect of this yet
unsearched route remaining so, and the racing mania for Melville Island
and Cape Walker bore for all of us this day its fruit--unavailing
regret.

A fresh and favourable gale from the northward raised our spirits and
hopes, late as it now was in the season, and already, with the
adventurous feelings of seamen, we began to calculate what distance
might yet be achieved, should the breeze but last for two or three
days. The space to be traversed, even to Behring's Straits, was a mere
nothing; and all our disappointments, all our foiled anticipations,
were forgotten, in the light-heartedness brought about by a day of open
water and a few hours of a fair wind. As we rattled along the lane of
blue water which wound gracefully ahead to the westward, the shores of
Cornwallis Island rapidly revealed themselves, and offered little that
was striking or picturesque. One uniform tint of russet-brown clothed
the land, as the sun at eight in the evening sunk behind the ice-bound
horizon of Wellington Channel.

Novel and striking as were the colours thrown athwart the cold, hard
sky by the setting orb, I thought with a sigh of those gay and
flickering shades which beautify the he