d provisions,
over ice and snow. To extend those searches as much as possible, and to
prepare the men for that work when it should come, advanced depots were
now sent forward in the autumn, under the charge of the gentlemen who
would have to use them in the spring.

One of these parties, the "South line of Melville Island" party, was
under a spirited young officer Mr. Mecham, who had tried such service in
the last expedition. He had two of "her Majesty's sledges," "The
Discovery" and "The Fearless," a depot of twenty days' provision to be
used in the spring, and enough for twenty-five days' present use. All
the sledges had little flags, made by some young lady friends of Sir
Edward Belcher's. Mr. Mecham's bore an armed hand and sword on a white
ground, with the motto, "_Per mare, per terram, per glaciem_" Over mud,
land, snow, and ice they carried their depot, and were nearly back,
when, on the 12th of October, 1852, Mr. Mecham made the great discovery
of the expedition.

On the shore of Melville Island, above Winter Harbor, is a great
sandstone boulder, ten feet high, seven or eight broad, and twenty and
more long, which is known to all those who have anything to do with
those regions as "Parry's sandstone," for it stood near Parry's
observatory the winter he spent here, and Mr. Fisher, his surgeon, cut
on a flat face of it this inscription:--

HIS BRITANNIC MAJESTY'S
SHIPS HECLA AND GRIPER,
COMMANDED BY
W.E. PARRY AND MR. LIDDON,
WINTERED IN THE ADJACENT
HARBOR 1819-20.
A. FISHER, SCULPT.

It was a sort of God Terminus put up to mark the end of that expedition,
as the Danish gentlemen tell us our Dighton rock is the last point of
Thorfinn's expedition to these parts. Nobody came to read Mr. Fisher's
inscription for thirty years and more,--a little Arctic hare took up her
home under the great rock, and saw the face of man for the first time
when, on the 5th of June, 1851, Mr. McClintock, on his first expedition
this way, had stopped to see whether possibly any of Franklin's men had
ever visited it. He found no signs of them, had not so much time as Mr.
Fisher for stone-cutting, but carved the figures 1851 on the stone, and
left it and the hare. To this stone, on his way back to the "Resolute,"
Mr. Mecham came again (as we said) on the 12th of October, one memorable
Tuesday morning, having been bidden to leave a record there. He went on
in advance of his