verer of a north-west
passage had been repealed, but an old friend, Felix Booth, decided
to finance Ross, the Government having refused. "After examining
various steamships advertised for sale," says Ross, "I purchased the
_Victory_, which had been once employed as a packet." With food and
fuel for one thousand days, and accompanied by his nephew, James Ross,
who had been with Parry on his recent Polar voyage, he left England
the end of May 1829, not to return for many a long year. Disasters
soon began. The _Victory_ began to leak, her engines were defective,
and there was nothing for it but to heave up her paddles and trust
to sail. Sailing to the northward, they found the sea smooth and the
weather so warm that they could dine without a fire and with the
skylights off. Entering Lancaster Sound, they sailed up Prince
Regent's Inlet. They soon discovered the spot where the _Fury_ had
been wrecked four years before and abandoned by Captain Parry with
whom was James Ross, who now found the stores which had been safely
hidden on that occasion. As they made their way up the inlet, strong
currents and vast masses of ice hard and solid as granite more than
once threatened them with destruction.

"Imagine," says Captain Ross, "these mountains hurled through a narrow
strait by a rapid tide, meeting with the noise of thunder, breaking
from each other's precipices huge fragments, till, losing their former
equilibrium, they fall over headlong, lifting the sea around in
breakers and whirling it in eddies."

Escaping these perils, Ross entered a fine harbour. Here he landed,
hoisted the colours, and took possession of the new land he had found,
and, drinking the King's health, called the land Boothia, after his
patron. For the next two months, August and September, he carefully
explored the coast of this newly discovered Boothia for some three
hundred miles, naming points and capes and islands after friends at
home and on board. Heavy squalls of snow and ever-thickening ice
pointed out the necessity of winter quarters, and 1st October found
the _Victory_ imprisoned by thick immovable ice. "The prison door was
shut upon us for the first time," says Ross sadly. "Nothing was to
be seen but one dazzling, monotonous extent of snow. It was indeed
a dull prospect. Amid all its brilliancy, this land of ice and snow
has ever been, and ever will be, a dull, dreary, heart-sinking,
monotonous waste, under the influence of which the very mind