days in the fortnight.

On the 11th of April, Captain McClure, with Mr Court, second master,
and a sledge party, started to cross the ice on sledges, to visit Winter
Harbour, in Melville Island. Soon after leaving the ship a thick fog
came on, and continued for several days, so that their destination was
not reached till the 28th.

We must picture to ourselves the sort of work these brave men had to go
through, to do full justice to their perseverance and courage,--day
after day travelling on, dragging their sledges across the frozen
strait, often in the face of biting winds, encamping night after night
with simply a tent to shelter them and a spirit-lamp only with which to
cook their food or to afford them warmth. Yet thus, during that
eventful period in the history of Arctic discovery, were many hundred
British seamen employed in different portions of the icy ocean, all
nobly engaged in the search for their lost countrymen and brother
sailors. Not only for month after month, but year after year,--the only
interruption being the dark, long night of mid-winter, and the brief
period of summer navigation,--when, amid icebergs and ice-fields,
whirled here and there, tossed by storms, and urged impetuously on by
currents, they forced their way onward, in the hope of gaining the open
ocean in another hemisphere.

At Winter Harbour Captain McClure found a large fragment of sandstone,
with this inscription--"His Britannic Majesty's ships _Hecla_ and
_Griper_, Commanders Parry and Lyddon, wintered in the adjacent harbour
during the winter of 1819-20. _A. Fisher, sculpsit_." Lieutenant
McClintock had left a notice of his visit on the previous year on the
same fragment, and protected it by a large cairn. In this cairn Captain
McClure now deposited his own despatches, giving a plan of the way he
intended to proceed under the various circumstances which might occur.
One portion especially is worthy of notice.

After stating his intention of visiting Port Leopold, in Barrow's
Straits, and of leaving there information of the route he purposed to
pursue, he says: "Should no intimation be found of our having been
there, it may be at once surmised that some fatal catastrophe has
happened, either from being carried into the Polar Sea, or smashed in
Barrow's Straits, and no survivors left. If such should be the case, it
will then be quite unnecessary to penetrate farther to the westward to
our relief, as, by the period that an