'The Transactions of the Bombay Geographical Society. From December 1854 to March 1856. (New Issue.) Edited by the Secretary. Volume XII.' [‎29] (140/258)

ON ARCTIC DISCOVERY— 1824-1835.
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and refit the Victory, and recruit their supplies. In the middle of August they
reached the place where the Hexla had been wrecked; and though every trace
of the vessel herself had disappeared, preserved meats, wines, spirits, and other
stores, were found piled up on the beach, as fresh and good, after the lapse of
four years, as the day on which they had been put on board. This second piece
of Providential fortune saved the expedition : the Victory excepting as a
home was next to useless—their explorations were nearly all conducted over
the ice or by boats. The most striking of their discoveries—the only one in
deed of any considerable moment—was that of the position of the Magnetic
Pole in Lat. 70 ° 5’7” N., Long. 66 ° 46’45” W.,—six miles further north, and
two degrees more westerly, than the position theoretically assigned to it. Here
the dipping needle pointed perpendicularly, and the compass needle swept
round without any polarity. After many hardships, privations, toils, and wan
derings, the explorers made their way to Baffin’s Bay, and stood out in their
boats to sea they were on the 26th August picked up by the Isabella, a
Hull whaler which Captain Ross had himself formerly commanded. They
reached England in October 1833, after an absence of nearly four years, hav-
i n cr spent three winters amongst the ice. A few months before the return of
Captain Ross’s expedition, Captain Back who had shortly before accompanied
Captain (afterwards Sir John) Franklin in an expedition overland, started in
quest of the missing navigators, who had turned up before he had well entered
on his travels He proceeded, however, with his explorations, and returned to
England in October 1835. With these close the Arctic Expeditions, up to the
timeofthe despatch of that, the fatal tidings of which have so lately reached us.
Want of space compels me to pass over the discoveries of Captain Scoresby,
and to confine myself to expeditions connected in some way with that o-
wards which public attention was for so longso anxiously turned I must not
at the same time, overlook the attempts made to penetrate to the northward
tiiroug^Behring’s Straits, betwixt Asia and America. This had beena part of
the project of Captain Cook, who in 1779 reached latitude 70 ° 41; where he was
stopped by a barrier of ice, apparently impenetrable : a second “ de
after his death by Captain Clarke the following year, was still more ummpoi
tart than the first. So far back as the days of Forbisher it had “' e 8 e “'
ral opinion that Greenland was an island, or group ofishuds-fiiat ftere
a great polar basin, free of land, and most probably of ice, which once reach
ed! would leave an easy passage through. The Russians wodd be sav^d a
voyage of 18,800 miles in visiting their North Ameneansettlements, cmdd toy
reach Behring’s Straits by the Pole in place oi by Cape Horn. Caplam Pet
,, . , ° , , r 1 -R.ffin’a Bav in 1776, in hopes of proceeding in the
tingal had been deputed to Baffin s 15 J Pnntain Cook
direction afterwards followed by Ross and Parry, so as o a P