But the peace of 1814 seemed for a time likely to prove a barrier to a seaman's hopes of distinction and advancement, till, as we have already said, it reawakened the zeal for the exploration of the Arctic waters. For employment in such an enterprise Parry was one of the first to offer himself; and when, in the spring of 1818, Captain Ross was sent out to prosecute the search for a passage from Baffin's Bay to the North Pacific, Parry accompanied him in the Alexander sloop as second in command. That expedition, however, failed altogether. The authorities at the Admiralty were as yet so ill-informed respecting the Arctic seas that the instructions furnished to Captain Ross were found to be wholly impracticable; and he, though a hardy, resolute man, had no such experience as qualified him to supply their deficiencies. He was bewildered by the fogs common to those regions, which, on one occasion, misled him into mistaking a bank of clouds for a range of mountains, to which he even gave the name of "Croker," in compliment to one of the secretaries to the Admiralty. And after three or four months he returned home without having succeeded in penetrating beyond Baffin's Bay.

But the advocates of Northern discovery were not men to be disheartened by a single failure. Brief and unsuccessful as the expedition had been, it had not been wholly barren of valuable results; it had brought back information which enabled the authorities to form more accurate ideas of what was to be expected, and of the

means best suited to accomplish those expectations. And the next year a fresh expedition was fitted out, the command of which was entrusted to Parry, who, of all the officers engaged in the former one, was thought to have displayed the greatest acuteness, energy, and capacity for command, with the further recommendation that what he had seen had impressed him with a firm conviction that such a passage as was desired had a real existence, and might therefore surely be found by better-directed endeavours.

As in the expedition of 1818, two ships, the Hecla and the Griper, were fitted out, that, in case of an accident, one might be at hand to assist her consort. Parry's was the Hecla, the Griper being placed under Lieutenant Liddon, the second in command. Both ships were carefully strengthened to encounter the shocks of the ice; and on the 12th of May they left the Thames, sailing up the eastern coast till they reached the Orkneys, from which they crossed over at once to Greenland. They met with very heavy weather, and the Griper unfortunately proved a very heavy sailer, but they bore on stoutly, and by the middle of June reached Cape Farewell, the southernmost point of Greenland; and doubling it, proceeded up Davis's Strait. Dangers beset them from the very first. The ice that year was unusually far down; and, before they had gone half the distance up the Strait, they were beset by huge icebergs, surrounded by large fields of floating ice, among which the ships for a time became unmanageable. And they