Islands. This was the first European winter party in the Arctic
circle. Its details are familiar enough. How the men cut in three
days, through ice seven inches thick, a canal two miles and a half
long, and so brought the ships into safe harbour. How the genius of
Parry equalled the occasion; how there was established a theatre and
a North Georgian Gazette, to cheer the tediousness of a night which
continued for two thousand hours. The dreary, dazzling waste in
which there was that little patch of life, the stars, the fog, the
moonlight, the glittering wonder of the northern lights, in which,
as Greenlanders believe, souls of the wicked dance tormented, are
familiar to us. The she-bear stays at home; but the he-bear
hungers, and looks in vain for a stray seal or walrus--woe to the
unarmed man who meets him in his hungry mood! Wolves are abroad,
and pretty white arctic foxes. The reindeer have sought other
pasture-ground. The thermometer runs down to more than sixty
degrees below freezing, a temperature tolerable in calm weather, but
distressing in a wind. The eye-piece of the telescope must be
protected now with leather, for the skin is destroyed that comes in
contact with cold metal. The voice at a mile's distance can be
heard distinctly. Happy the day when first the sun is seen to graze
the edge of the horizon; but summer must come, and the heat of a
constant day must accumulate, and summer wane, before the ice is
melted. Then the ice cracks, like cannons over-charged, and moves
with a loud grinding noise. But not yet is escape to be made with
safety. After a detention of ten months, Parry got free; but, in
escaping, narrowly missed the destruction of both ships, by their
being "nipped" between the mighty mass and the unyielding shore.
What animals are found on Melville Island we may judge from the
results of sport during ten months' detention. The island exceeds
five thousand miles square, and yielded to the gun, three musk oxen,