inst the field like a Whitechapel
game-cock.

Whilst Captain Ommanney went to Cape Walker for some observations, we
pulled foot (with forced marches) straight across the floe for
Griffith's Island. Every hour wasted in the return journey was a crime,
we felt, towards those whom we had come here to save. The fast
increasing heat told that the open season was at hand: and even if we
could not get our ship to the water, we had brought out a number of
beautiful boats, built expressly, at a great expense; our foot journeys
in the spring had been new and successful, what might we not yet expect
from boat expeditions when the floes were in motion?

On reaching that part of the frozen strait which was evidently covered
with only one season's ice, namely, that of about three feet in
thickness, symptoms of a speedy disruption were very apparent; long
narrow cracks extended continuously for miles; the snow from the
surface had all melted, and, running through, served to render the
ice-fields porous and spongy: the joyful signs hurried us on, though
not without suffering from the lack of pure snow, with which to procure
water for drinking. At last Griffith's Island rose above the horizon; a
five-and-twenty-mile march brought us to it, and another heavy drag
through the melting snow carried us to our ships, on the 12th June,
after a journey of five hundred miles in direct lines, in fifty-eight
days. We were punished for our last forced march by having five out of
the sledge-crew laid up with another severe attack of snow-blindness.

Eight-and-forty hours afterwards, Captain Ommanney arrived; he had
crossed some of the cracks in the floe with difficulty, aided by a
bridge of boarding-pikes; and Lieut. Mecham, with the sledge "Russell,"
coming from Cape Walker, on the 17th of June, was obliged to desert his
sledge, and wade through water and sludge to Griffith's Island, and
thence to the ships: showing how remarkably the breaking up of the ice
in Barrow's Strait promised to coincide in date with the time it was
first seen to be in motion, by Sir E. Parry's squadron, in 1820.

All the parties were now in, except three sledges and twenty-one men,
towards Melville Island; the supports in that direction had suffered in
about the same ratio as ourselves to the southward; the progress,
however, as might be expected where the coast-line was known, was more
rapid. The total number of accidents from frost-bites amounted to
eighteen, and am