forcement. That capon is the Duke of Wellington, who immediately directs these chickens, which are the light cavalry, to charge the enemy in flank. These partridges are the French flying artillery, which that calf's-head, which is the French general, orders forward to act as a point d'appui to that dish of beef-à-la-mode, which these maintenon cutlets-no, the harico opposite, is about to attack. Thus you see the battle is fairly begun. The partridges, you observe, have opened a heavy fire on the chickens and stewed duck, which are advancing with the courage of lions to the charge, and the French general is riding up and down the table-I mean the field, attended by these butter-boats, which are his aides-de-camp; and this mustard-pot, which is the quartermaster-general. But I fear, after all, I have not succeeded in making the plan of the battle quite intelligible,'' Oh, perfectly, I assure you. Pray go on, I am quite interested I declare.' Luckily for me, however, the dishes were in the act of being removed, and this change of the matériel de guerre, having thrown all the operations of the battle into confusion, a cessation of hostilities was found necessary. Cyril Thornton, vol. ii., p. 373-376.

We know not whether either of these authors will be flattered, when we say, that we read Cyril Thornton' with a lively suspicion that it was from the pen of the Subaltern.' We have since discovered that such is not the case; and perceive, that the writer of the novel announces A Narrative of the Peninsular Campaigns,' -in which he must be prepared to encounter closer comparison with his brother-author; and from which we are certainly prepared to expect a great deal, both of entertainment and instruction.

ART. XI.-Narrative of an Attempt to reach the North Pole, in Boats fitted for the purpose, and attached to His Majesty's Ship Hecla, in the year 1827, under the command of Captain William Edward Parry, R.N., F.R.S., and Honorary Member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences at St. Petersburg. Published by authority of his Royal Highness the Lord High Admiral. London. 4to. 1828.

THE

HE' attempt' which is here described, though unsuccessful, is of so bold and daring a character, that it will stand as a record to the latest posterity of the patient, persevering, energetic, and undaunted conduct which British seamen are capable of displaying, in the most difficult, discouraging, and dangerous circumstances, when under the command of prudent and intelligent officers in whom they have entire confidence. It will stand also as a noble monument to future ages, of the heroic and enterprising spirit of the distinguished officers who directed the energies of these brave fellows.

It

It is almost superfluous to say, that the conduct of Captain Parry on the late, as on all former occasions, appears to have been above all praise. That conduct has frequently been put to trial in the most arduous and critical situations, but in none, perhaps, where prudence, foresight, skill, and mild but strict discipline, were more strongly required than on the enterprise we are about to speak of. It appears to us, indeed, after a careful perusal of the narrative, that had any one of these qualities been wanting in the commander, it is more than probable not a man would have returned to tell the melancholy catastrophe of the Polar Expedition. Let but any one conceive for a moment the situation of two open boats, laden with seventy days' provisions, and clothing for twenty-eight men, in the midst of a sea covered nearly with detached masses and floes of ice, over which these boats were to be dragged, sometimes up one side of a rugged mass and down the other; sometimes across the lanes of water that separated them; frequently over a surface covered with deep snow, or through pools of water;-let him bear in mind that the men had little or no chance of any other supply of provisions than what they carried with them, calculated as just sufficient to sustain life, and consider what their situation would have been in the event, by no means an improbable one, of losing any part of that scanty stock ;-let him also recollect that they were exposed to all the vicissitudes of a climate whose temperature did not much exceed, and was sometimes below, the freezing point, in the midst of heavy rains and snow, in which, for forty days or more, out of the sixty-three passed in this manner, nothing was visible all around but the sea, thus covered with these straggling masses of ice, and overhead a murky sky-let any one try to imagine to himself a situation of this kind, and he will still have but a faint idea of the exertions which the men under Captain Parry had to make, and the sufferings and privations they had to undergo. That, under such circumstances, the expedition should have failed, is less wonderful than that it should have returned with every officer and man, in nearly as good a state of health as when the adventurous band quitted their ship and took to the boats. There is something in the failures of Captain Parry that compensates the want of success, and that reconciles us to the disappointment.

Having first laid before our readers a brief abstract of the proceedings in the boats, we shall then offer a few general observations on this and the other arctic voyages, which have been so ably conducted by Captain Parry and his associates.

The object of the present expedition was to reach the North Pole by means of two sledge-boats, so constructed as either to travel over the ice, or sail or row through spaces of open water,

as

as circumstances might require. Captain Parry's old ship the Hecla was appointed to carry him and his companions to Spitzbergen, and there to wait in some secure harbour for his return. The vessel left the Nore on the 4th of April, reached Hammerfest on the 18th, and on the 27th, having received on board a number of trained rein-deer (which proved useless), made sail to the northward. On the 14th of May, the Hecla was abreast of Hakluyt's Headland, when she was obliged to run into the mainice for security in a heavy gale of wind. She remained beset and drifting about with the ice, chiefly to the eastward, for four-andtwenty days, when, on the 8th of June, she was liberated by a southerly wind dispersing the ice.

This detention was the more provoking, as the weather was delightful; I never remember,' says Captain Parry, to have experienced in these regions such a continuance of beautiful weather as we now had, during more than three weeks that we had been on the northern coast of Spitzbergen.' They had clear and cloudless skies, light airs, and a scorching sun. Twice he thought of leaving the Hecla, and taking to the boats, but her safety, in such a sea, if thus left with fewer than half her working hands, could not be reckoned upon for an hour; besides, he could not have known when or where to meet with her on his return. 'The nature of the ice,' he tell us, 'was beyond all comparison, the most unfavourable for our purpose that I ever remember to have seen. The men,' he continues, compared it to a stone-mason's yard, which, except that the stones (masses) were of ten times the usual dimensions, it, indeed, very much resembled.'

On reaching the Seven Islands, they were found to be all shut in by land-ice; but the party deposited on one of them, Walden Island, a store of provisions for their return. Captain Parry then stood on to the northward among loose and broken ice, in search of the main body, as far as 81° 5′ 32"; but not finding anything like a field of ice, she stood back to the southward, and on the 19th of June discovered a bay on the north coast of Spitzbergen, in which the Hecla was anchored in latitude 79° 55′ N., longitude 16° 54' E. It is named in the Dutch charts Treurenberg Bay; and was, no doubt, so called by the Dutch, in consequence of some great mortality among their whale-fishermen, which is sufficiently indicated by the number of graves on that melancholy shore. *

On the 21st of June, Captain Parry set out on his arduous, we might, perhaps, say perilous undertaking, with two boats named the Enterprize and Endeavour; Mr. Beverly, the surgeon, being

*Treuren is, to lament.

attached

attached to his own, and Lieutenant (now Commander) Ross, accompanied by Mr. (now Lieutenant) Bird in the other; Lieutenant (now Commander) Foster being left in charge of the Hecla. At Little Table Island, the highest latitude of land known on the globe, they left a deposit of provisions for their return. The following extract will put the reader in possession of the mode in which this gallant party pursued their journey :

Our plan of travelling being nearly the same throughout this excursion, after we first entered upon the ice, I may at once give some account of our usual mode of proceeding. It was my intention to travel wholly at night, and to rest by day, there being, of course, constant daylight in these regions during the summer season. The advantages of this plan, which was occasionally deranged by circumstances, consisted, first, in our avoiding the intense and oppressive glare from the snow during the time of the sun's greatest altitude, so as to prevent, in some degree, the painful inflammation in the eyes, called "snow-blindness," which is common in all snowy countries. We also thus enjoyed greater warmth during the hours of rest, and had a better chance of drying our clothes; besides which, no small advantage was derived from the snow being harder at night for travelling. The only disadvantage of this plan was, that the fogs were somewhat more frequent and more thick by night than by day, though even in this respect there was less difference than might have been supposed, the temperature during the twenty-four hours undergoing but little variation. This travelling by night and sleeping by day so completely inverted the natural order of things, that it was difficult to persuade ourselves of the reality. Even the officers and myself, who were all furnished with pocket chronometers, could not always bear in mind at what part of the twenty-four hours we had arrived; and there were several of the men who declared, and I believe truly, that they never knew night from day during the whole excursion.*

'When we rose in the evening, we commenced our day by prayers, after which we took off our fur sleeping-dresses, and put on those for travelling; the former being made of camblet, lined with racoon-skin, and the latter of strong blue box-cloth. We made a point of always putting on the same stockings and boots for travelling in, whether they had dried during the day or not; and I believe it was only in five or six instances, at the most, that they were not either still wet or hard-frozen. This, indeed, was of no consequence, beyond the discomfort of first putting them on in this state, as they were sure to be

*Had we succeeded in reaching the higher latitudes, where the change of the sun's altitude during the twenty-four hours is still less perceptible, it would have been essentially necessary to possess the certain means of knowing this; since an error of twelve hours of time would have carried us, when we intended to return, on a meridian opposite to, or 180° from, the right one. To obviate the possibility of this, we had some chronometers constructed by Messrs. Parkinson and Frodsham, of which the hour-hand made only one revolution in the day, the twenty-four hours being marked round the dial-plate.

thoroughly

thoroughly wet in a quarter of an hour after commencing our journey; while, on the other hand, it was of vital importance to keep dry things for sleeping in. Being " rigged" for travelling, we breakfasted upon warm cocoa and biscuit, and after stowing the things in the boats and on the sledges, so as to secure them, as much as possible, from wet, we set off on our day's journey, and usually travelled from five to five and a half hours, then stopped an hour to dine, and again travelled four, five, or even six hours, according to circumstances. After this we halted for the night, as we called it, though it was usually early in the morning, selecting the largest surface of ice we happened to be near, for hauling the boats on, in order to avoid the danger of its breaking up by coming in contact with other masses, and also to prevent drift as much as possible. The boats were placed close alongside each other, with their sterns to the wind, the snow or wet cleared out of them, and the sails, supported by the bamboo masts and three paddles, placed over them as awnings, an entrance being left at the bow. Every man then immediately put on dry stockings and fur boots, after which we set about the necessary repairs of boats, sledges, or clothes; and, after serving the provisions for the succeeding day, we went to supper. Most of the officers and men then smoked their pipes, which served to dry the boats and awnings very much, and usually raised the temperature of our lodgings 10° or 15°. This part of the twenty-four hours was often a time, and the only one, of real enjoyment to us; the men told their stories, and "fought all their battles o'er again," and the labours of the day, unsuccessful as they too often were, were forgotten. A regular watch was set during our resting-time, to look out for bears or for the ice breaking up round us, as well as to attend to the drying of the clothes, each man alternately taking this duty for one hour. We then concluded our day with prayers, and having put on our fur-dresses, lay down to sleep with a degree of comfort, which perhaps few persons would imagine possible under such circumstances; our chief inconvenience being, that we were somewhat pinched for room, and therefore obliged to stow rather closer than was quite agreeable. The temperature, while we slept, was usually from 36° to 45°, according to the state of the external atmosphere; but on one or two occasions, in calm and warm weather, it rose as high as 60° to 66°, obliging us to throw off a part of our fur-dress. After we had slept seven hours, the man appointed to boil the cocoa roused us, when it was ready, by the sound of a bugle, when we commenced our day in the manner before described.

Our allowance of provisions for each man per day was as follows:

Our fuel consisted entirely of spirits of wine, of which two pints

formed