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Page 45
He did not die. He got a few hours' sleep, felt better and started
again, but had the discouragement of finding such tokens of an open
strait the last year that he felt sure that the ship he was going to
look for would be gone. One morning, he had been off for game for the
dogs unsuccessfully, and, when he came back to his men, learned that
they had seen seventeen deer. After them goes Pim; finds them to be
_three hares_, magnified by fog and mirage, and their long ears
answering for horns. This same day they got upon the Bay of Mercy. No
ship in sight! Right across it goes the Lieutenant to look for records;
when, at two in the afternoon, Robert Hoile sees something black up the
bay. Through the glass the Lieutenant makes it out to be a ship. They
change their direction at once. Over the ice towards her! He leaves the
sledge at three and goes on. How far it seems! At four he can see people
walking about, and a pile of stones and flag-staff on the beach. Keep
on, Pim; shall one never get there? At five he is within a hundred
yards of her, and no one has seen him. But just then the very persons
see him who ought to! Pim beckons, waves his arms as the Esquimaux do in
sign of friendship. Captain McClure and his lieutenant Haswell are
"taking their exercise," the chief business of those winters, and at
last see him! Pim is black as Erebus from the smoke of cooking in the
little tent. McClure owns, not to surprise only, but to a twinge of
dismay. "I paused in my advance," says he, "doubting who or what it
could be, a denizen of this or the other world." But this only lasts a
moment. Pim speaks. Brave man that he can. How his voice must have
choked, as if he were in a dream. "I am Lieutenant Pim, late of
'Herald.' Captain Kellett is at Melville Island." Well-chosen words,
Pim, to be sent in advance over the hundred yards of floe! Nothing about
the "Resolute,"--that would have confused them. But "Pim," "Herald," and
"Kellett" were among the last signs of England they had seen,--all this
was intelligible. An excellent little speech, which the brave man had
been getting ready, perhaps, as one does a telegraphic despatch, for the
hours that he had been walking over the floe to her. Then such shaking
hands, such a greeting. Poor McClure could not speak at first. One of
the men at work got the news on board; and up through the hatches poured
everybody, sick and well, to see the black stranger, and to hear his
news from England. It was nearly three years since they had seen any
civilized man but themselves.
The 28th of July, three years before, Commander McClure had sent his
last despatch to the Admiralty. He had then prophesied just what in
three years he had almost accomplished. In the winter of 1850 he had
discovered the Northwest Passage. He had come round into one branch of
it, Banks Straits, in the next summer; had gladly taken refuge on the
Bay of Mercy in a gale; and his ship had never left it since. Let it be
said, in passing, that most likely she is there now. In his last
despatches he had told the Admiralty not to be anxious about him if he
did not arrive home before the autumn of 1854. As it proved, that autumn
he did come with all his men, except those whom he had sent home before,
and those who had died. When Pim found them, all the crew but thirty
were under orders for marching, some to Baffin's Bay, some to the
Mackenzie River, on their return to England. McClure was going to stay
with the rest, and come home with the ship, if they could; if not, by
sledges to Port Leopold, and so by a steam-launch which he had seen left
there for Franklin in 1849. But the arrival of Mr. Pim put an end to all
these plans. We have his long despatch to the Admiralty explaining them,
finished only the day before Pim arrived. It gives the history of his
three years' exile from the world,--an exile crowded full of effective
work,--in a record which gives a noble picture of the man. The Queen
has made him Sir Robert Le Mesurier McClure since, in honor of his great
discovery.
Banks Land, or Baring Island, the two names belong to the same island,
on the shores of which McClure and his men had spent most of these two
years or more, is an island on which they were first of civilized men to
land. For people who are not very particular, the measurement of it
which we gave before, namely, that it is about the size and shape of
Ireland, is precise enough. There is high land in the interior probably,
as the winds from in shore are cold. The crew found coal and dwarf
willow which they could burn; lemmings, ptarmigan, hares, reindeer, and
musk-oxen, which they could eat.
"Farewell to the land where I often have wended
My way o'er its mountains and valleys of snow;
Farewell to the rocks and the hills I've ascended,
The bleak arctic homes of the buck and the doe;
Farewell to the deep glens where oft has resounded
The snow-bunting's song, as she carolled her lay
To hillside and plain, by the green sorrel bounded,
Till struck by the blast of a cold winter's day."
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