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ARCTIC EXPLORATION.*

THE battle of the Arctic regions has been fought out and out again. On the one side is man, by nature weak, sensitive, and frail; on the other, privation, gloom, and cold, stern and ever-enduring. But, on the one hand, is also mind, ever ready, like the tiny Fox, that is fitted up for the encounter by its workings, to penetrate into its ice-encumbered seas, or, like the Aurora, to light up into life and cognisance remote shores wrapped in the silence and solitude of death. But has mind always been victorious? How many ships have now been abandoned to the relentless frost since the Fury was first stranded on the coast of North Somerset ? How many gallant fellows have paid for the heroic resolution to face and overcome difficulties, sent in this instance not by man but by nature, with their lives? What a picture of helplessness is presented to us in what remained of the crew of the Erebus and Terror, dropping one by one as they made their last endeavour to leave the battle-field behind them? And is the sad picture relieved by a few daring escapes and brilliant successes, or even by M'Clintock's dauntless search for bones and relics? We fear not. The struggle is not equal. When Providence closes up a portion of the globe in ice and snow, and wraps it up in night for half of the year, leaving all around without life, or movement, or light, it sets its seal upon that region as if it was tabooed of humanity, and marks it as a land on whose outskirts even the stubborn Esquimaux can only starve on precarious seals' flesh and blubber.

Far would it be from us to underrate the gallantry and heroism of our brave and unflinching countrymen in carrying out these struggles, now renewed with what has been done by others for about the hundred and thirtieth time; we estimate it at the very highest, as requiring higher qualities of courage, fortitude, and endurance, than any amount of struggle between man and man, and we are as much carried away by the mystery and romance of untrod regions of perpetual ice, and remote lands bathed in gloom and darkness, as it is perhaps possible to be. We honour the graves of those who have died there, and weep for the memory of the unburied.

But what has this sacrifice of life and vessels, and this persistent expenditure, which would have almost sufficed to construct a railway from Constantinople to Lahore, or to have united the St. Lawrence with Fraser's River by an iron bond, been incurred for? In the first place, to solve a geographical problem; in the second, to serve the cause of humanity. Both honourable incentives, and worthy of good and true men, and of an enterprising and grateful nation. The problem was the discovery of a north-west passage; and we are now told that Sir John Franklin was the first to effect it. This is no doubt the case, viewed in the light of an open way beyond being known to the unfortunate navigator. As much cannot be said of Sir Edward Parry's first expedition, when he discovered Parry's Strait, and afterwards crossed the meridian of 110° west, for which he obtained the reward of 5000l., albeit, as far as practical results are concerned, this first expedition may be said to have determined the existence of a north-west passage as much as any that

*The Voyage of the Fox in the Arctie Seas. A Narrative of the Discovery of the Fate of Sir John Franklin and his Companions. By Captain M'Clintock, R.N., LL.D., &c.

have followed it just as much as when Sir R. M'Clure reached Melville Island from Banks's Land in 1852, or when Lieutenant Pym and Sir R. M'Clure met, one coming from the east the other from the west, and the Atlantic shook hands with the Pacific, on the 6th of April, 1853-one of the most touching incidents in Arctic exploration. Prince Regent's Inlet has been since shown to communicate by Bellot Strait with continuous sea, and Parry's Strait-or, as it is now called, Parry or Melville Sound-to communicate with the same sea by Prince of Wales's Strait and M'Clure's Strait. Captain Sir R. M'Clure was no more successful in conveying his ship through the strait that bears his name, and which lies between Banks's Land and Melville Island, than Parry was in navigating from the east. Captain Collinson, on his part, was no more successful in navigating his ship coming from the west by Victoria Strait, between Victoria Land and King William Island, to Lancaster Sound, than Sir John Franklin was in navigating his ships through the same strait coming from the east. The Erebus and Terror were beset in the ice in Victoria Strait in September, 1846, and were abandoned in the same ices in April, 1848. Almost all the Arctic travellers have been on the track of the north-west passage; none have effected it, even by foot or sledge, save Sir R. M'Clure and his party, to whom the reward has been justly decreed, and none have succeeded in carrying their ships through.

Captain M'Clintock says: "With respect to a navigable north-west passage, and to the probability of our having been able last season to make any considerable advance to the southward, had the barrier of ice across the western outlet of Bellot Strait permitted us to reach the open water beyond, I think, judging from what I have since seen of the ice in Franklin Strait, that the chances were greatly in favour of our reaching Cape Herschel, on the south side of King William's Land, by passing (as I intended to do) eastward of that island."

It does not become us to question the judgment of so experienced an officer; but we may be permitted to say that a mere glance at the map which accompanies M'Clintock's narrative would show that, if the only chance of navigating between the two oceans lay through such a devious channel as Ross's Strait, Rae Strait, and Simpson's Strait, when the wide Strait of Victoria was right before them, it was a very small chance indeed. That which is equally remarkable is, that Sir R. M'Clure, when he reached the Bay of Mercy, where the Investigator was frozen in and abandoned, was but a very short distance of the parallel attained by Parry on the 16th of August, 1820. Had he been able to effect the remaining space, the north-west passage would have been carried out, but by two different ships, one coming from the east, the other from the west, and that in the same strait. Captain Collinson, it may also be remarked, when he reached his farthest in Prince of Wales Strait, which was only a trifle beyond what M'Clure reached in the same strait, attained nearly the same parallel of west longitude as Sir Edward Parry did in the north in 1820. So that the north-west passage was on that occasion once more nearly effected by two different navigators coming in opposite directions. And that which is almost equally remarkable is, that when Captain Collinson wintered in Cambridge Bay, in Victoria Land, in 1852-3, he explored the coast of that land along the strait of same name, and between it and King William Island, to a point northward, or beyond where the Erebus and Terror were abandoned in 1848. It is not at all probable that, if Captain

Collinson had pushed on his sledge-parties to the eastward to King William Island, he would have found any survivors of the Franklin expedition, but he would have anticipated M'Clintock in ascertaining their fate, if he had not discovered the sad but interesting document brought home by the last-mentioned intrepid traveller.

Apart from these curiosities of Arctic travel and exploration, quite enough has been shown, as far as a north-west passage is concerned, that, whether attempted by the way of Banks's Strait, Prince of Wales Strait, or by Franklin or M'Clintock's Channels, and then by Ross's or Victoria Strait, the so-called passages are seldom or ever free from ice, and that a number of contingencies are essential to a successful navigation from one ocean to the other. Among the first of these is the attainment of any one of these before-mentioned straits—a task of no ordinary magnitude, and generally entailing the loss of one season; the second is to get through the ice accumulated at the entrance of the straits; and the third is, supposing the season to be one of those in which the ice breaks up, to be exactly at the spot, to move along with the floe or pack, or to fight through it and against it, as the circumstances may be. The abandonment of the Investigator, and of a whole squadron of ships, by Sir Edmund Belcher, and the fact that the Erebus and Terror lay two years beset in the ice of Victoria Strait, anxiously waiting for an opening which their crews were never doomed to see, show what little hope there is of an available north-west passage ever being discovered. The thing seems to be quite out of the question; and unless some change of climate should occur (and which is not impossible, for there are evidences of such a change both in natural phenomena and in the fact of the Esquimaux having once dwelt in higher latitudes than they venture to do at present), it is not likely that the north-west passage will ever be navigated.

There is one further fact connected with this question which has been eliminated by Captain M'Clintock's voyage, and which ought not to be lost sight of, and that is, that if Bellot's Strait presents a navigable channel to the west, it could be reached by Hudson Strait and the Gulf of Boothia, as well as by Baffin's Bay and Lancaster Sound; or, vice versâ, if attained from the west, a ship could sail home by Hudson Strait instead of Baffin's Bay. It will remain for Arctic travellers to determine whether the pack in Baffin's Bay, which has carried so many ships, and the little For the last among them, back resistless to whence they started, is more difficult to overcome than the ice-clogged straits and narrows which intervene between Hudson Strait and the Gulf of Boothia. They are, at all events, in more southerly latitudes.

A further result of these numerous and arduous expeditions has been undoubtedly to add considerably to our geographical knowledge, to enlarge the domains of science, and to create and uphold that spirit of enterprise and perseverance which it is to be hoped will never be found wanting in the British sailor or the man of science. Hopes were held out for a time of the existence to the north of an open sea, replete with animal life, and over which benignant, if not balmy gales, were to waft even ordinary sailing vessels from the Northern Ocean to Behring's Straits, or even round the circum-Polar regions to the same ocean from whence they proceeded. But these hopes, founded, as they were, upon but partial recog nisances and imperfect data, arising from accidental openings and an unusual congregation of living things, have not been doomed to be substantiated.

While in the present day the line of the northern limit of the distribution of the human race makes a curve from the coast of America up and across Cockburn Island to still more northerly latitudes in Greenland (and M'Clintock found the Arctic Highlanders, as he calls them, of Cape York rapidly diminishing in numbers from famine and disease), whales of two or three kinds, narwhals, walruses, seals, dolphins, grampus, cod, and various fish; musk oxen, reindeer, Polar bears, Arctic foxes and hares, geese, ducks, auks, divers, gulls and snow-buntings, have all been met with in the high latitudes of Wellington Channel. But these and other evidences, as those of occasional open water, drift wood, and Esquimaux relics, are not sufficient to prove the existence of an open Arctic Ocean in the circum-Polar regions.

Captain M'Clintock has, we believe-for the appendix to the journey of the Fox has not yet been published-corroborated the determination by Sir James Ross of the position of the north magnetic pole, by which we find, as is the case with the magnetic equator, or that line round the earth's central circumference upon which the magnetic needle is horizontal, and has no dip, that it does not coincide with the terrestrial equator, so the point of the vertical dip of the north magnetic pole-and the same thing has been observed of the south magnetic pole is by no means coincident with the geographical poles. This would tend to show that the position of the magnetic poles is liable to change, and this is rendered all the more probable as the lines of greatest magnetic intensity (or isodynamical versus isoclinial lines) present two foci in the northern hemisphere the one in North America, and the other in Siberia; and these appear to coincide with the two points of greatest cold-phenomena that may vary with the seasons.

Materials for forming a general conception of the geological structure of the Arctic Archipelago have been gradually accumulating, and Professor Haughton, availing himself of the additional facts obtained by M'Clintock, has condensed the whole into a judicious summary and a comprehensive little map, as eloquent in its distinctive lines as the gaudily coloured saxifrages, parryas, oxyrias, drabas, dryas, papavers, and other characteristic Arctic plants, which are so pleasantly grouped together in Dr. Sutherland's account of the searching expedition under Mr. Penny, give a general idea, and that at one glance, of the peculiarities of Polar vegetation.

Murchison Promontory, which bounds Bellot Strait to the south, has been determined now to be the most northerly point of the American continent-its Arctic Cape Horn. But, after all, Boothia is a mere peninsula, like the Melville peninsula; its isthmus is even narrower, and neither will ever be looked upon much as continental adjuncts.

Sir R. I. Murchison has attached to M'Clintock's narrative a small map representing all the lands and seas of the Arctic regions to the west of Lancaster Sound which were known and laid down previous to Franklin's last expedition, and the unknown waters traversed by the Erebus and Terror during the two summers before the ships were beset-strange to say, in the most southerly latitudes which they attained-and the novelty, range, rapidity, and boldness of the route, Sir Roderick remarks, as thus delineated, may well surprise the geographer, and even the most. enterprising Arctic sailor. A heart-stirring, albeit partly imaginary, sketch of the last voyage of Sir John Franklin has also been drawn up

for Once a Week by Captain Sherard Osborn upon such data as were available.

Captain M'Clintock has also himself made considerable additions to the previous knowledge of the Arctic Archipelago, besides determining the course followed by the Erebus and Terror. He has more particularly explored the hitherto unknown coast line of Boothia, southwards from Bellot Strait to the magnetic pole, delineated the southern part of Prince of Wales Island, laid down the whole of King William Island, and determined the existence of a new and capacious, but ice-choked, channel between Victoria Land and Prince of Wales Island.

An immense number of new names have been thus added to the maps -it is grievous to think that they are little more than names, for few of them indicate a site inhabited by human beings, or a point of any interest or importance whatsoever, except as beacons to save the future explorer from destruction. Captain M'Clintock has, however, shown unusual judgment and good taste in the designations which he has bestowed upon places. Hitherto all the great blocks of land, with some few exceptions, have been devoted to royalty, or the Admiralty, or to those in power, from that lively sense of gratitude which is said to anticipate favours to come. The exceptions are Boothia, North Somerset, North Devon, Grinnell Land, and a few others. M'Clintock has not only rendered justice to real gratitude in affixing the names of Ackland, Murchison, Fitzroy, Pasley, De la Roquette, and other supporters of Arctic research, to various points, but he has honoured science in the persons of Brodie and Livingstone; and he has not even forgotten the claims of literature, for we have now a Point Charles Dickens and a Point Thackeray in the Arctic Archipelago, where the Melvilles, and the Dundases, and the Bathursts, and the Barrows have hitherto had it all their own way. Pity it is that callous map-makers will, in future atlases, clip and crop this redundancy of Arctic nomenclature with an iron pen, and leave nothing but what has a geographical meaning and import, not a mere human one. It is to be regretted that the names of the leaders of expeditions were not attached at the onset to the discoveries originally effected by them, or by those associated with them. We should then have Parry's Land, Ross Land, Franklin Land, Richardson Land, Beechey Land, Kelley, Collinson, M'Clure, Austin, Belcher, Osborn, M'Clintock, Inglefield, and Rae Lands; worthy monuments to the gallantry and devotion of those who, themselves and their companions, ran so many risks, and suffered so many privations and hardships in first determining their existence-results in now notorious instances achieved only by the most heroic sacrifice of life.

It is vain, however, to reflect or to moralise upon all the infinitesimal bearings of Arctic exploration. It has the deep attraction of enterprise and adventure attached to it. It is indelibly imprinted in the more noble aspiring and humane attributes of our nature. The mere notion breathes of romance, heroism, and glory. It is, in fact, a part of civilised nature to pant after the Unknown, and in future times the Russians, as they progress in enterprise and enlightenment, will probably explore the lofty and extensive lands that have been seen north of Behring's Straits, with the same zeal, if not the same indomitable courage and power of endurance, that the British have exhibited in tracing their Arctic Archipelago amidst the snow, the ice, and winter gloom of the Polar regions.

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