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At one time we are frying with the heat and blinded with the light, like Indians caught on a burning prairie; at another, we are freezing in the pitchy darkness of a hyperborean winter, like Sir John Franklin's merry men in the Bay of Boothia. Madame La Nature, you don't forget your devotees; on the contrary, you overwhelm us with your attentions!"
He discovered the land known as Boothia Felix, and his nephew, James C. Ross, proved that it belonged to the mainland of America, which he coasted along by land to Cape Franklin, besides determining the exact position of the North Magnetic Pole at Cape Adelaide, on Boothia Felix.
We met a sled with a few natives coming from Kigmuktoo to join the rest of the tribe on the lake, and with them was an aged crone named Toolooah, who had seen white men in Boothia Isthmus, when a young woman, and had also been with the party who found the boat and skeletons in Starvation Cove, near Richardson Point. She confirmed the testimony previously obtained in every essential particular.
However, it was the etiquette of the court, and every court, from the Cape of Good Hope to the country of Boothia, that is, if a court were ever held in the latter place, is cursed with the ridiculous forms of ceremony and etiquette; it must be repeated, that at the court which his highness the caboceer of Jannah, in the plenitude of his official importance, held at that place, it was a rule of etiquette, that every stranger, of whatever rank or nation, should choose for himself a partner, wherewith to dance an African fandango or bolero; and it may be easily supposed that, when the Europeans looked around them, and saw the African beauties squatting on their haunches, or reclining, in graceful negligence, on banks of mud, a great difficulty existed as to whom they should select to be their partners in the African quadrille.
Curiously enough, in the following year J. Rae had been despatched by land from Cape Repulse in Hudson's Bay, and had coasted along the east coast of Boothia, thus connecting Ross's and Franklin's coast journeys with Hudson's Bay. On 18th April 1847 Rae had reached a point on Boothia less than 150 miles from Franklin on the other side of it.
It must be borne in mind that the north pole of the earth and the north magnetic pole are two entirely different points. As a matter of fact, if the mariner be in the arctic waters north of Boothia Peninsula his compass points south. The arctic currents have been carefully studied with valuable results, and it has been found that the drift of the polar ice-floe is constantly to the eastward.
Rounding a point at the bottom of Prince Regent's Inlet, we find Felix Harbour, where Sir John Ross wintered. His nephew made from this point scientific explorations; discovered a strait, called after him the Strait of James Ross, and on the northern shore of this strait, on the main land of Boothia, planted the British flag on the Northern Magnetic Pole.
The brig, which drew little water, sailed along the west coast; Hatteras did not wish to miss the entrance to Bellot Strait, as the only outlet to the Gulf of Boothia on the south was the strait, only partially known to the Fury and the Hecla; if he missed the Bellot Strait, he might be shut up without possibility of egress.
It is now almost a quarter of a century since the Caspian and Black Seas were connected, through the enterprise of Russian capitalists. The newest project broached is to cut through from the Gulf of Boothia to Hudson's Bay, in latitude 65° N. and longitude 90° W. from Greenwich.
The poised needle of the compass maintains its relative position because of the magnetic poles of the earth, one located in the north polar regions, on the western side of the peninsula of Boothia, and the other in the south polar regions, on Victoria Land.
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