Volltext Seite (XML)
!>6 Letters written during the late Voyage of Discovery LETTER XIII. Winter Harbour, 1st August, 1820. Once more, my dear Thomas, and for the last time, I do most sincerely pray, you have a letter from me, dated in Winter Harbour. We have long been preparing for our departure ; and every thing being now in perfect readiness, we trust the sun will not revisit our northern meridian before we are again under sail. The paper which accompanies this has been written at different times, as materials could be collected, and as opportunities for committing them to paper occurred. For since my last letter, or the first of last month, what with real indispensable occupations on board, and what from that restlessness of mind by which other folks, as well as myself, in our little world, are affected, when in the daily, hourly expectation of being set free from our wearisome bondage, if the paper were yet to prepare, prepared by me at the present juncture it could not possibly be. In perusing this account of the expedition across Melville Island, a name I have never hitherto brought forward, you will naturally be surprised when you meet with the comprehensive term we, at the same time that my former communication stated that 1 was not one of that party. The fact is, that both in con versing with those who were on that expedition, and in reading their travelling notes, we came in so frequently and so properly, that it fairly insinuated itself into my memoranda without call, indeed without my being aware of it. My next letter will probably contain the decision of a most important question : not exactly whether a passage for ships from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean can be discovered to be practicable at any time of the year, but whether we, at this point of the season, can accomplish such a voyage. We are here in W. long. 110°, and N. lat. 75°- Behring’s Strait, the only known opening between the American and the Asiatic continents, is in W. long. l70 o . and N. lat. 6(>'°. The direct distance, there fore, across the globe, between these two points, cannot be less than five hundred and fifty leagues. We are now in the begin ning of August, and we caunot forget that it cost us no small trouble to cut our way through the ice into this haven, in the latter end of September, after struggling with mighty masses of that substance off the land for many weeks before. That we shall achieve such a work, therefore, in the little remaining ot