Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/336

Rh 320 POLAR REGIONS Parry s attempt to reach the pole. Graah. The Rosses. Back. Simpson and Dease. Rae. northern coast of Spitsbergen, by means of sledge-boats, has been described under the heading PARRY. The highest latitude reached was 82 45 N. ; and the attempt showed that it is useless to leave the land and trust to the drifting pack in polar exploration. In 1829 the Danes undertook an interesting piece of exploration on the east coast of Greenland. Captain Graah of the Danish navy rounded Cape Farewell in boats, with four Europeans and twelve Eskimo. He advanced as far as 65 18 N. on the east coast, where he was stopped by an insurmountable barrier of ice. He wintered at Nugarlik in 63 22 N., and returned to the settlements on the west side of Greenland in 1830. In the year 1829 Captain John Ross, with his nephew James, having been furnished with sufficient funds by a wealthy distiller named Felix Booth, undertook a private expedition of discovery in a small vessel called the &quot;Victory.&quot; Boss proceeded down Prince Regent s Inlet j to the Gulf of Boothia, and wintered on the eastern side of a land named by him Boothia Felix. In the course of exploring excursions during the summer months James Ross crossed the land and discovered the position of the north magnetic pole on the western side of it, on June 1, 1831. He also discovered a land to the westward of Boothia which he named King William Land, and the northern shore of which he examined. The most northern point, opposite the magnetic pole, was called Cape Felix, and thence the coast trended south-west to Victory Point. James Ross was at Cape Felix on May 29, 1830. The Rosses never could get their little vessel out of its winter quarters. They passed three winters there, and then fell back on the stores at Fury Beach, where they passed their fourth winter of 1832-33. Eventually they were picked up by a whaler in Barrow Strait, and brought home. Great anxiety was naturally felt at their prolonged absence, and in 1833 Sir George Back, with Dr Richard King as a companion, set out by land in search of the missing explorers. Wintering at the Great Slave Lake, he left Fort Reliance on June 7, 1834, and descended the Great Fish River, which is obstructed by many falls in the course of a rapid and tortuous course of 530 miles. The mouth was reached in 67 11 N., when the want of supplies obliged them to return. In 1836 Sir George Back was sent, at the suggestion of the Royal Geographical Society, to proceed to Repulse Bay in his ship, the &quot; Terror,&quot; and then to cross an assumed isthmus and examine the coast-line thence to the mouth of the Great Fish River ; but the ship was obliged to winter in the drifting pack, and was brought back across the Atlantic in a sinking condition. The tracing of the polar shores of America was completed by the Hudson s Bay Company s servants. In June 1837 Messrs Simpson and Dease left Chippewyan, reached the mouth of the Mackenzie, and connected that position with Point Barrow, which had been discovered by the &quot;Blossom&quot; in 1826. In 1839 Simpson passed Cape Turnagain of Franklin, tracing the coast eastward so as to connect with Back s work at the mouth of the Great Fish River. He landed at Montreal Island in the mouth of that river, and then advanced eastward as far as Castor and Pollux river, his farthest eastern point. On his return he travelled along the north side of the channel, which is in fact the south shore of the King William Island discovered by James Ross. The south-western point of this island was named Cape Herschel, and there Simpson built a cairn on August 26, 1839. Very little more remained to be done in order to complete the delineation of the northern shores of the American continent. This was entrusted to Dr John Rae, a Hudson s Bay factor, in 1846. He went in boats to Repulse Bay. where he wintered in a stone hut nearly on the Arctic Circle ; and he and his six Orkney men maintained themselves on the deer they shot. During the spring of 1847 Dr Rae explored on foot the shores of a great gulf having 700 miles of coast-line. He thus con nected the work of Parry, at the mouth of Fury and Hecla Strait, with the work of Ross on the coast of Boothia, proving that Boothia was part of the American continent. While the English were thus working hard to solve some of the geographical problems relating to Arctic America, the Russians were similarly engaged in Siberia. In 1821 Lieutenant Anjou made a complete survey of the Anjou New Siberia Islands, and came to the conclusion that it was not possible to advance far from them in a northerly direction, owing to the thinness of the ice and to open water within 20 or 30 miles. Baron Wrangell prosecuted Wranj similar investigations from the mouth of the Kolyma between 1820 and 1823. He made four journeys with dog sledges, exploring the coast between Cape Tchelagskoi and the Kolyma, and making attempts to extend his journeys to some distance from the land. He was always stopped by thin ice, and he received tidings from a native chief of the existence of land at a distance of several leagues to the northward. In 1843 Middendorf was sent Midde to explore the region which terminates in Cape Tchel- dorf - yuskin. He reached the cape in the height of the short summer, whence he saw open water and no ice blink in any direction. The whole arctic shore of Siberia had now been explored and delineated, but no vessel had yet rounded the extreme northern point, by sailing from the mouth of the Yenisei to that of the Lena. When that feat was achieved the problem of the north-east passage would be solved. The success of Sir James Ross s Antarctic expedition Frank and the completion of the northern coast-line of America expedi by the Hudson s Bay Company s servants gave rise in 1845 to a fresh attempt to make the passage from Lancas ter Sound to Behring Strait. The story of this unhappy expedition of Sir John Franklin, in the &quot;Erebus&quot; and &quot;Terror,&quot; has already been told under FRANKLIN (q.v.}; but some geographical details may be given here. To understand clearly the nature of the obstacle which finally stopped Sir John Franklin, and which also stopped Sir Edward Parry in his first voyage, it is necessary to refer to the map. Westward of Melville and Baring Islands, northward of the western part of the American coast, and northward of the channel leading from Smith Sound, there is a vast unknown space, the ice which encumbers it never having been traversed by any ship. All navigators who have skirted along its edge describe the stupendous thickness and massive proportions of the vast floes with which it is packed. This accumulation of ice of enormous thickness, to which Sir George Nares has given the name of a &quot; Palaiocrystic Sea,&quot; arises from the absence of direct communication between this portion of the north polar region and the warm waters of the Atlantic and Pacific. Behring Strait is the only vent in a south westerly direction, and that channel is so shallow that the heavy ice grounds outside it. In other directions the channels leading to Baffin s Bay are narrow and tortuous. In one place only is there a wide and straight lead. The heavy polar ice flows south-east between Melville and Baring Islands, down what i^ now called M Clintock Channel, and impinges on the north-west coast of the King William Land discovered by James Ross. It was this branch from the palaeocrystic sea which finally stopped the progress of Franklin s expedition. On leaving the winter-quarters at Beechey Island in 1846, Franklin found a channel leading south, along the western shore of the land of North Somerset discovered by Parry in 1819. If he could reach the channel on the American coast, he knew that he would be able