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24 Letters written during the late Voyage of Discovery LETTER VI. Lancaster’s Sound, Wednesday ]*< September, IS 19. Well do I know, my dear Thomas, that no incident, no opera tion on board ship, since I left London, however uninteresting to a stranger, will be passed over by you and my other friends at home, as of little importance or unworthy of notice. The transactions and occurrences noticed in my letters hitherto, have in them, nevertheless, nothing new, nothing extraordinary, no thing but what may, and doubtless often does happen, to all who navigate the seas which we have traversed. Our adventures among the hills and shoals of ice, which occupy the middle por tion of Davis’s Strait and Baffin’s Bay, are, however, certainly out of the ordinary course of sea affairs ; for it was necessary that we should quit the usual track of shipping bound for those quarters ; because the object for which the expedition was fitted out, is of a nature very different from those contemplated in the commercial enterprises of our countrymen, or of the mariners of other nations, who resort to the northern seas. I am now to commence my remarks on a region hitherto un known, or at any rate certainly undescribed by any navigator. This is the inlet of the sea opening into Baffin’s Bay, on the west side, called Sir James Lancaster’s Sound; the nature of which has, for many years, and in particular since the return of the expedi tion of 1818, occasioned no small diversity of opinion, among men of geographical and nautical science. The term sound, employed by Baffin, has sometimes been supposed to signify an inlet of the sea, but not a passage communicating with the open sea at the opposite extremity. If, however, we look to the application of the term in known cases, we find that it is, in fact, just what now- a-days we call a strait. Thus we have the Sound of Elsineur, leading from the Atlantic into the Baltic, between Denmark and Sweden. Nearer home we have the Sound of Mull, which sepa rates that island from the continent of Scotland. In embarking on an expedition, for the purpose of determining the true nature of Lancaster’s Sound, therefore, the anxiety which occupies every one engaged is beyond description : to conceive it, indeed, it requires to be felt. You will, of course, readily forgive me, if at once I return to my own dull matter-of-fact mode of relating things and notions as they present themselves to my notice. One thing I must, however, mention, which occasions very serious uneasiness to us all. This is, that the Griper, which at first kept a pretty equal pace with the Hccla, wbeu sailing on a wind,