Fast beset in Victoria Harbour, they now, in October, began to dismantle the ship, land the provisions, and place their two boats so as to be able to construct sledges under them. The winter passed over as usual, except that one case of scurvy occurred. In February, 1832, however, the medical report was less favourable than it had hitherto been; all were much enfeebled: an old wound which Captain Ross had in his side broke out, with bleeding,—one of the indications of scurvy. The cold was intense; but the Captain says, the thermometer, in the first week of April, rose on a sudden to plus 7°, not having passed zero before for 136 days. I do not believe,' he adds, there is another record of such a continuous low temperature; and it was a state of things most certainly to confirm us in our resolution of leaving the ship to her helpless fate, and attempting to save ourselves in the best manner that we could.' Accordingly, towards the end of April, they commenced carrying forwards a certain quantity of provisions, and the boats with their sledges, for the purpose of advancing more easily afterwards. The labour of proceeding over ice and snow was most severe, and the wind and snow-drift rendered it almost intolerable.

On the 21st of May, all the provisions had been carried forward to the several deposits, except as much as would serve for about a month. In the process of forming these deposits, it was found that they had travelled, forwards and backwards, 329 miles to gain about thirty in a direct line. Preparation was now made for their final departure, which took place on the 29th of May :

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'We had now secured everything on shore which could be of use to us in case of our return; or which, if we did not, would prove of use to the natives. The colours were therefore hoisted and nailed to the mast, we drank a parting glass to our poor ship, and having seen every man out, in the evening I took my own adieu of the Victory, which had deserved a better fate. It was the first vessel that I had ever been obliged to abandon, after having served in thirty-six, during a period of forty-two years. It was like the last parting with an old friend; and I did not pass the point where she ceased to be visible without stopping to take a sketch of this melancholy desert-rendered more melancholy by the solitary, abandoned, helpless home of our past years, fixed in immovable ice till time should perform on her his usual work.'-p. 643.

On the 1st of July, after a full month's most fatiguing journey, they encamped on Fury Beach. The first thing to be done was

By the way, Captain Ross's original drawings, some of which we have accidentally seen, would have disgraced the fingers of a schoolboy of twelve. Those from which his engravings have been manufactured may be pretty things-but what is the value of such graphic illustrations' in a case like this? and was it not rather odd to inscribe them with Ross delineaviť' ?

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to construct a house, which was to be 31 by 16 feet, and 7 feet high; to be covered with canvass. The next was to set the carpenters to work in repairing the three boats of the Fury.

On the 1st of August the ice unexpectedly broke up, leaving some navigable clear water, on which they prepared to embark, in the hope of reaching Baffin's Bay before the departure of the whaling vessels. The boats were stored with two months' provisions, bedding, and other necessary articles; and each carried seven men, with an officer. The sudden setting in of ice, however, obliged them to haul the boats on shore; and from this time they crept among rocks, and ice, and ice-bergs, along shore, on to the last day of August, when they reached the north-eastern extremity of America, as Sir J. Ross asserts it to be; and here they were stopped, by finding the sea, at the junction of Regent's Inlet with Barrow's Strait, covered with one solid mass of ice. They remained here three days, when every one agreeing that all hope of escape was at an end, and that nothing remained for them but to return to Fury Beach, they prepared for this retrograde movement. Commander Ross, it is said, began here to more than hesitate respecting their escape; and Sir John admits that, with regret, he began himself to question whether they should succeed in passing the barrier of ice that season.

On the 25th of September, therefore, they determined to commence their return. Their situation had now become truly serious; it was even doubtful whether the state of the ice would allow them to work their boats back to Fury Beach; they had but ten days' provision left, at half allowance, nor fuel enough remaining to melt the snow for their required consumption of water, They were now also experiencing the greatest sufferings they had yet endured from the cold. They were soon convinced that going back in the boats was out of the question; they therefore hauled them up on the beach above high-water mark, and the carpenter set about making sledges out of the empty bread-casks.

On the 7th of October, after a most toilsome and harassing. journey, they reached their house-our labours at an end, and ourselves once more at home.' Here, of the provisions left behind them, flour, sugar, soups, peas, vegetables, pickles, and lemonjuice, were in abundance; but of preserved meats there remained not more than would suffice for their voyage in the boats during

next season.

We have hitherto refrained from noticing any of the numerous charges brought against Sir John Ross in the book of Huish; but there is one, to which a circumstance that occurred in this journey has given rise, of so serious a nature that, in our opinion, it ought long ago to have been contradicted distinctly. Sir John may affect

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to treat it with what is called silent contempt, which is but too frequently resorted to when it may not be quite convenient to answer a charge of delinquency. We do not believe the fact to be as stated, for, with all his faults, we do not think the Captain lacks humanity; but Huish on this occasion is particularly precise as to dates and circumstances, and there can be no doubt that the story he tells, or something very like it, has been widely circulated by the men who composed Sir John's late crew. The Captain himself loosely mentions that a man of the name of Taylor had his foot, or a great part of it, amputated, on account of its being frost-bitten. Describing his journey on the 4th Oct. 1832, he says, to increase our troubles, the lame man, Taylor, could neither walk with his crutches nor ride on the sledges, which were perpetually upsetting upon the rough ice; in some manner or other, however, we gained a bad resting-place at seven.' On the next day he says, we gained seven miles on this day's journey, in spite of a strong cold wind and constant snow, and were enabled to carry the mate, Taylor, by returning for him with an empty sledge. Burdened and obstructed as we were, this was a great additional grievance; but they who were inclined to murmur had, at least, the satisfaction of reflecting that their case was better than his.'-(p. 678.) This is all that Sir John Ross has stated, though, being just at the end of his book, he had time enough to have disavowed the charge-which, as we said before, we should have deemed a more prudent course than to shelter himself under a dignified silence. Whether a long and lugubrious paragraph about 'ingratitude, obloquy,' &c. &c. at p. 705, has any reference to the case of Taylor we know not, but it is too mysterious for us to dwell upon. The statement in Huish is as follows:

'The sledges were made for the transportation of some of the immediate requisites, but not of sufficient strength to bear the weight of a man, in addition to the necessary cargo. Under these circumstances, the conveyance of Taylor, by means of the sledges, was considered as next to impracticable; and, therefore, the question was raised, whether it were possible for him to hobble on his stump, and, if that could not be accomplished, in what manner was he to be got to Fury Beach? The whole of the crew proffered their aid towards rendering the conveyance of him as easy as possible; but a very different plan was suggested by Captain Ross, and that was, to leave the poor fellow behind them! If this horrid suggestion be founded in truth, Captain Ross must, at the time, have been under the dominion of some fiend of hell, for from no other source could such an infernal idea have been poured into his mind.'-Huish, p. 659.

We may pass the monotonous proceedings of the winter at Fury Beach. The chief event, which cast a damp on all, was the death

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of the carpenter, on the last day of February, 1833. The want, however, of exercise, of sufficient employment, short allowance of food, lowness of spirits produced by the unbroken sight of the dull, melancholy, uniform waste of snow and ice, had the effect of reducing the whole party to a more indifferent state of health than had hitherto been experienced. Two of the seamen were far gone in the scurvy:

'We were indeed all very weary of this miserable home. . . Even the storms were without variety: there was nothing to see out of doors, even when we could face the sky; and within, it was to look, equally, for variety and employment, and to find neither. If those of the least active minds dozed away their time in the waking stupefaction which such a state of things produces, they were the most fortunate of the party. Those among us who had the enviable talent of sleeping at all times, whether they were anxious or not, fared best.' -Ross, p. 695.

At length, the long-looked-for period arrived when it was deemed necessary to abandon the house, in search of better fortune; and on the 7th of July, being Sunday, the last divine service was performed in their winter habitation. The following day they bade it adieu for ever! and having been detained a short time at Batty Bay, and finding the ice to separate, and a lane of water open out, they succeeded in crossing over to the eastern side of Prince Regent Inlet. Standing along the southern shore of Barrow's Strait, on the 26th of August they discovered a sail,—and, after some tantalizing delays, they succeeded in making themselves visible to the crew of one of her boats :

'She was soon alongside, when the mate in command addressed us, by presuming that we had met with some misfortune and lost our ship. This being answered in the affirmative, I requested to know the name of his vessel, and expressed our wish to be taken on board. I was answered that it 66 was the Isabella of Hull, once commanded by Captain Ross;" on which I stated that I was the identical man in question, and my people the crew of the Victory. That the mate, who commanded this boat, was as much astonished at this information as he appeared to be, I do not doubt; while, with the usual blunderheadedness of men on such occasions, he assured me that I had been dead two years. I easily convinced him, however, that what ought to have been true, according to his estimate, was a somewhat premature conclusion; as the bear-like form of the whole set of us might have shown him, had he taken time to consider that we were certainly not whaling gentlemen, and that we carried tolerable evidence of our being "true men, and no impostors," on our backs, and in our starved and unshaven countenances. A hearty congratulation followed of course, in the true seaman style, and, after a few natural inquiries, he added that the Isabella was commanded by Captain Humphreys; when he immediately

immediately went off in his boat to communicate his information on board; repeating that we had long been given up as lost, not by them alone, but by all England.

'As we approached slowly after him to the ship, he jumped up the side, and in a minute the rigging was manned; while we were saluted with three cheers as we came within cable's length, and were not long in getting on board of my old vessel, where we were all received by Captain Humphreys with a hearty seaman's welcome.

Though we had not been supported by our names and characters, we should not the less have claimed, from charity, the attentions that we received, for never was seen a more miserable-looking set of wretches; while, that we were but a repulsive-looking people, none of us could doubt. If, to be poor, wretchedly poor, as far as all our present property was concerned, was to have a claim on charity, no one could well deserve it more; but if to look so be to frighten away the so-called charitable, no beggar that wanders in Ireland could have outdone us in exciting the repugnance of those who have not known what poverty can be. Unshaven since I know not when, dirty, dressed in the rags of wild beasts instead of the tatters of civilization, and starved to the very bones, our gaunt and grim looks, when contrasted with those of the well-dressed and well-fed men around us, made us all feel, I believe for the first time, what we really were, as well as what we seemed to others. Poverty is without half its mark unless it be contrasted with wealth; and what we might have known to be true in the past days, we had forgotten to think of, till we were thus reminded of what we truly were, as well as seemed to be.

But the ludicrous soon took place of all other feelings; in such a crowd and such confusion, all serious thought was impossible, while the new buoyancy of our spirits made us abundantly willing to be amused by the scene which now opened. Every man was hungry and was to be fed, all were ragged and were to be clothed, there was not one to whom washing was not indispensable, nor one whom his beard did not deprive of all English semblance. All, everything, too, was to be done at once; it was washing, dressing, shaving, eating, all intermingled; it was all the materials of each jumbled together; while, in the midst of all, there were interminable questions to be asked and answered on all sides; the adventures of the Victory, our own escapes, the politics of England, and the news which was now four years old. But all subsided into peace at last. The sick were accommodated, the seamen disposed of, and all was done, for all of us, which care and kindness could perform. Night at length brought quiet and serious thoughts; and I trust there was not one man among us who did not then express, where it was due, his gratitude for that interposition which had raised us all from a despair which none could now forget, and had brought us from the very borders of a not distant grave, to life, and friends, and civilization.

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Long accustomed, however, to a cold bed on the hard snow or the bare rock, few could sleep amid the comfort of our new accommoda