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The boys had not only reached Baffin's Land, but had explored over a hundred miles of its uncharted coast-line, crossed to Cape Wolstenholme, navigated Stupart's Bay northeast of Ungava and finally returned to Baffin's Land, coming back to Cartwright on the Hudson Bay Company's steamer Pelican.
From the affinity which was found to subsist between the dialects of the Greenlanders and Esquimaux, and those of the inhabitants of Norton's Sound and Oonalashka, there is strong reason to believe, that all these nations are of the same extraction; and, if that be the case, the existence of a northern communication of some kind, by sea, between the west of America and the east side, through Baffin's Bay, can scarcely be doubted; which communication, nevertheless, may effectually be shut up against ships, by ice and other impediments.
Captain Buchan, commanding the Trent and the Dorothy was directed to attempt a passage between Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla, over the Pole, into the Pacific, and Captain Ross, commanding the Isabella and the Alexander, to attempt the north-west passage from Davis' Straits and Baffin's Bay, into the Frozen Ocean, and thence into the Pacific.
It was in Banks Strait that Sir Edward Parry was finally stopped by the great undulating floes, reaching 102 feet in thickness, that he tells us he had never seen in Baffin's Sea or in the land-locked channels the had left behind him, but which filled the whole sea before him. Such floes are the edge of a pack which we may conjecture extends uninterruptedly from shore to shore of the Polar Sea.
At last, on the 10th, a favourable breeze drove the ice out of the bay, and the trim little Fox, under sail and steam, merrily darted out of her prison, and hurried north towards Barrow's Straits. She reached Baffin's Bay, and, touching at the Danish settlements, arrived in the English Channel on the 20th of September, having made the passage under sail in nineteen days from Greenland.
Onward, but a few knots an hour, the Dipsey moved like a fish in the midst of the sea. The projectors of the enterprise had a firm belief that there was a channel from Baffin's Bay into an open polar sea, which would be navigable if its entrance were not blocked up by ice, and on this belief were based all their hopes of success.
On the return of Cook from his second voyage, Pickersgill was appointed commander of the Lion, and sent to survey Baffin's Bay, but he was relieved of the command early in 1777, and then we lose sight of him. Wilkinson also had served under Wallis, but he died soon after the return of the Endeavour, and Bootie died on the way home. The best-known of these log-writers is Charles Clerke.
The dogs were not less than fifty or sixty in number, and had nothing about them different from those on the eastern coast of Baffin's Bay, except they do not stand near so high as those of the latitude of 76°. They are very shy and wild, and the natives had great difficulty in catching them while we were by, as well as holding them in when caught.
It should also be stated that the terms "malamute" and "husky" are very generally confused and often used interchangeably. The malamute, the Alaskan Esquimau dog, is precisely the same dog as that found amongst the natives of Baffin's Bay and Greenland.
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.
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