Little Nore on the 4th April; and arrived at Hammerfest, in Lapland, on the 19th of the same month. From thence Lieutenant Crozier was sent in one of her own boats, to Alten, a distance of about 60 English miles, for the purpose of procuring some tame rein-deer to draw the sledge-boats over the ice. During the absence of that officer, Captain Parry and Lieutenant Foster made a series of magnetic and other observations; the Hecla’s supply of water was completed; a small quantity of venison, an abundance of good fish, and some milk were obtained; and the people selected to travel over the ice to the northward were practised in walking in their snowshoes, which afforded them fine exercise and amusement.
On the 5th May, being then in lat. 73° 30', and long. 7° 28' E., Captain Parry met with the first straggling mass of ice, after which, in sailing about 110 miles in a N.N.W. direction, there was always a number of loose masses in sight; but it did not occur in continuous “streams”, till the morning of the 7th, in lat. 74° 56', a few miles to the eastward of the meridian of Greenwich. On the 9th, he wrote to the Secretary of the Admiralty, by a whale ship, acquainting him with the Hecla’s arrival in the latitude of 77° and by the following morning he had succeeded in pushing about 60 miles farther to the northward, though not without some heavy blows in “boring” through the ice. On the 14th, he arrived off Hakluyt’s Headland; and on the same day of the ensuing month he had reached the latitude of 81° 5' 32", in longitude, by chronometers, 10° 34’ 00" E. This was the most northern position the Hecla attained, and, in all probability the highest northern latitude ever reached by any ship, with the exception of one commanded by Mr. Scoresby, who states his having, in the year 1806, reached 81° 12' 42", by actual observation, and 81° 30', by dead reckoning.
The Hecla was now 25 miles to the northward of the station in which Phipps remarked, that “the ice appeared flat and unbroken,” as seen from a considerable height on shore; yet, all that Captain Parry could discover was quite of a contrary description. To the northward nothing could be seen but loose drift-ice; to the north-cast it was particularly open,
