of our fur dress. After we had slept seven hours, the man appointed to boil the cocoa roused us, by the sound of a bugle, when we commenced our day in the manner above described. Our daily allowance of provisions for each person was – biscuit, ten ounces; pemmican (compressed meat), nine ounces; sweetened cocoa powder, one ounce; and rum, one gill; – tobacco, three ounces per week. Our fuel consisted entirely of spirits of wine, of which two pints formed our daily allowance; the cocoa was cooked in an iron boiler over a shallow iron lamp, with seven wicks; a simple apparatus, which answered our purpose extremely well. We usually found one pint of the spirits of wine sufficient for preparing our breakfast, that is, for heating 28 pints of water, though it always commenced from the temperature of 32°. If the weather was calm and fair, this quantity of fuel brought it to the boiling point in about an hour and a quarter; but more generally the wicks began to go out before it had reached 200°. This, however, made a very comfortable meal to persons situated as we were. Such, with very little variation, was our regular routine during the whole of this excursion. We set off on our first journey over the ice at 10 v. m. on the 24th of June. The bags of pemmican were placed upon the sledges, and the bread in the boats, with the intention of securing the latter from wet; but this plan we were very soon obliged to relinquish.
Captain Parry and his companions (with only one spare shirt between every two persons) now commenced upon very slow and laborious travelling, their way lying over nothing but small loose rugged masses of ice, separated by narrow pools of water, obliging them frequently to launch and haul up the boats, each of which operations required them to be unloaded, and occupied nearly a quarter of an hour. This, however, was nothing more than they had expected to encounter at the margin of the ice, and for some distance within it; and every individual exerted himself to the utmost, with the hope of the sooner reaching the main, or field-ice. Captain Parry mentions, as a remarkable fact, that they had already experienced, in the course of that season, more rain than during the whole of seven previous summers taken together, though passed in latitudes from 7° to 16° lower than this. In the night of June 27th, after wading for some time through fresh water, from two to five inches deep, they came to the first tolerably heavy ice they had yet seen, but all broken up into masses of small extent. On the 28th, the boats were, with extreme difficulty, hauled over a tier of very high hummocks, during the performance of which operation, Captain Parry’s coxswain sustained considerable injury. On
