The Island Exceeds
Five Thousand Miles Square, And Yielded To The Gun, Three Musk Oxen,
Twenty-Four Deer, Sixty-Eight
Hares, fifty-three geese, fifty-nine
ducks, and one hundred and forty-four ptarmigans, weighing together
three thousand seven hundred
And sixty-six pounds - not quite two
ounces of meat per day to every man. Lichens, stunted grass,
saxifrage, and a feeble willow, are the plants of Melville Island,
but in sheltered nooks there are found sorrel, poppy, and a yellow
buttercup. Halos and double suns are very common consequences of
refraction in this quarter of the world. Franklin returned from his
first and most famous voyage with his men all safe and sound, except
the loss of a few fingers, frost-bitten. We sail back only as far
as Regent's Inlet, being bound for Behring Strait.
The reputation of Sir John Ross being clouded by discontent
expressed against his first expedition, Felix Booth, a rich
distiller, provided seventeen thousand pounds to enable his friend
to redeem his credit. Sir John accordingly, in 1829, went out in
the Victory, provided with steam-machinery that did not answer well.
He was accompanied by Sir James Ross, his nephew. He it was who, on
this occasion, first surveyed Regent's Inlet, down which we are now
sailing with our Phantom Ship. The coast on our right hand,
westward, which Parry saw, is called North Somerset, but farther
south, where the inlet widens, the land is named Boothia Felix.
Five years before this, Parry, in his third voyage, had attempted to
pass down Regent's Inlet, where among ice and storm, one of his
ships, the Hecla, had been driven violently ashore, and of necessity
abandoned.
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