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And fewer still remember that he lived in an age which, like our own, had its 'record-breaking' events at sea. Baffin's 'Farthest North, reached in 1616, was latitude 77° 45'. This remained an unbroken record for two hundred and thirty-six years.
The cakes soon become joined together as the frost increases. The place where this occurred was near to those wild cliffs that rise out of the sea in the channels or straits that lie at the head of Baffin's Bay.
The second was impractical, for the current carried the ice through the strait so fast, that any party trying to cross the floe, would have been carried south to where the strait widened out into Baffin's Bay before they could possibly pass the twenty-five miles which separated Cape Sabine from Littleton Island. Moreover, there was no considerable cache at the latter point, as Greely thought.
At six o'clock in the morning Richard Shandon, re-entering his cabin after having been relieved, found upon the table a letter with this address: "To the Commander, "On board the 'FORWARD, "Baffin's Sea." Shandon could not believe his own eyes, and before reading such a strange epistle he caused the doctor, James Wall and Johnson to be called, and showed them the letter.
While wintering far beyond the head of Baffin's Bay, and beyond the most northerly point, in that direction, that had at that time been reached by any previous traveller, Dr Kane made many interesting observations and discoveries. He seems to have penetrated deep into the heart of Nature's northern secrets.
Observations have long been made, that the current in Baffin's Bay runs to the south; and thus no doubt can remain that the mass of water which flows into Behring's Straits takes its course round America, and returns through Baffin's Bay into the Ocean." In 1819 the Russian government sent out another expedition, whose object was to trace the continent of America to the northward and eastward.
Her crew were received on the Hecla, which, after such an accident as this, was of course obliged to return to England. Parry's tempered spirit was not broken even by this last disaster. If the Arctic Ocean could not be reached from Baffin's Bay, were there not other routes still to be attempted?
But we have seen that the phenomena of glaciers, like those of currents, are in great part meteorological. The Gulf-Stream does not flow toward the English shore because the ocean-bottom slopes eastward; nor does the cold current of Baffin's Bay run down-hill when it pours its icy waters southward upon our northeast coast.
But of the new brotherhood that grew presently among men, of the saving of laws and books and machines, of the strange change that had come over Iceland and Greenland and the shores of Baffin's Bay, so that the sailors coming there presently found them green and gracious, and could scarce believe their eyes, this story does not tell.
They had just reached the shores of Baffin's Bay when a vessel appeared, which turned out to be the Isabel, once commanded by Ross himself, and which now received the refugees from the Victory. But England had not all this time been forgetful of her children, and had sent an expedition in search of them every year.
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