In consequence of Captain Ross having penetrated into Baffin’s Bay, an object only accomplished once before by Baffin himself, and which for two hundred years had been frequently again fruitlessly attempted, the Greenland ships which left England during the season immediately following Captain Ross’s return, were induced, in order to reach a fresh and unfished sea, to pursue the course that he had opened for them.  The circumstance that fourteen of them were wrecked, proves, unless the season had been uncommonly tempestuous, that Captain Ross must have conducted his expedition with considerable care and skill, notwithstanding he missed an excellent opportunity of either discovering a north-west passage, or of adding one more opening to those which were proved not to contain it.

The second sea expedition, to which we have already alluded, was under the direction of Captain Parry, who had sailed along with Captain Ross in the first expedition; he was therefore possessed of much knowledge and experience, which would prove essentially useful and directly applicable to the object he was about to undertake.  Two ships were fitted out with all necessary preparations for such a voyage, the Hecla bomb, and Griper gun-brig, and they sailed from the Thames early in the month of May 1819.  Of the high importance and value to navigators of the chronometer, Captain Parry had a striking and undoubted proof in the early part of his voyage.  On the 24th of May he saw a small solitary crag, called Rockall, not far from the Orkney Islands.  “There is,” he observes, in this part of his journal, “no more striking proof of the infinite value of chronometers at sea, than the certainty with which a ship may sail directly for a single rock, like this, rising like a speck out of the ocean, and at the distance of forty-seven leagues from any other land.”

About the middle of July he reached the latitude of 73 deg., after having made many fruitless attempts to cross the ice that fills the central portion of Davis’s Strait and Baffin’s Bay. the instructions of Captain Parry particularly pointed out the sound which Captain Ross had left unexplored, and which there could be no doubt was the Sir James Lancaster’s Sound of Baffin, to be most carefully and minutely examined, as the one by which it was most probable a north-west passage might be effected, or which, at least, even if not navigable, on account of the ice, would connect the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.  On the seventh day after entering this sound, he succeeded in reaching open water; but this was not reached without infinite difficulty and labour, as the breadth of the barrier of ice was found to be eighty miles; through this they penetrated by the aid of sailing, tracking, heaving by the capstan, and sawing, being able to advance, even with the assistance of all the methods, only at the rate of half a mile an hour, or twelve miles a day.