t was off; bade good by to the party
at Beechey Island, and was to try his fortune in independent command. He
had not the best of luck at starting. The reader must remember that one
great object of these Arctic expeditions was to leave provisions for
starving men. For such a purpose, and for travelling parties of his own
over the ice, Captain Kellett was to leave a depot at Assistance Bay,
some thirty miles only from Beechey Island. In nearing for that purpose
the "Resolute" grounded, was left with but seven feet of water, the ice
threw her over on her starboard bilge, and she was almost lost. Not
quite lost, however, or we should not be telling her story. At midnight
she was got off, leaving sixty feet of her false keel behind. Captain
Kellett forged on in her,--left a depot here and another there,--and at
the end of the short Arctic summer had come as far westward as Sir
Edward Parry came. Here is the most westerly point the reader will find
on most maps far north in America,--the Melville Island of Captain
Parry. Captain Kellett's associate, Captain McClintock of the
"Intrepid," had commanded the only party which had been here since
Parry. In 1851 he came over from Austin's squadron with a sledge party.
So confident is every one there that nobody has visited those parts
unless he was sent, that McClintock encouraged his men one day by
telling them that if they got on well, they should have an old cart
Parry had left thirty-odd years before, to make a fire of. Sure enough;
they came to the place, and there was the wreck of the cart just as
Parry left it. They even found the ruts the old cart left in the ground
as if they had not been left a week. Captain Kellett came into harbor,
and with great spirit he and his officers began to prepare for the
extended searching parties of the next spring. The "Resolute" and her
tender came to anchor off Dealy Island, and there she spent the next
eleven months of her life, with great news around her in that time.

There is not much time for travelling in autumn. The days grow very
short and very cold. But what, days there were were spent in sending out
carts and sledges with depots of provisions, which the parties of the
next spring could use. Different officers were already assigned to
different lines of search in spring. On their journeys they would be
gone three months and more, with a party of some eight men,--dragging a
sled very like a Yankee wood-sled with their instruments an