Resolute by Martin W. Sandler Read Free Book Online

retreat, making use of the same gesture, the nature of which we had not before understood. In the same way we imitated their shouts as well as we could, using the same interjection, heigh, yaw! which we afterwards found to be an expression of surprise and pleasure. We then advanced towards them while they halted, and presented the foremost with a looking glass and a knife, repeating the same presents to the whole, as they came up in succession. On seeing their faces in the glasses, their astonishment appeared extreme, and they looked round in silence, for a moment, at each other and at us; immediately afterwards they set up a general shout, succeeded by a loud laugh, expressive of extreme delight, as well as surprise, in which we joined, partly form inability to avoid it, and willing also to show that we were pleased with our new acquaintances.
    It was an extraordinary encounter. But it would prove to be a fateful missed opportunity as well. For now that they had established rapport with the natives, it never entered any of the white men’s minds to ask the Inuit to explain how they managed to survive in such a hostile environment. It would not be the last time that such an opportunity was ignored—a lapse that would lead to tragic consequences in the future.
    Leaving the natives, Ross and Parry sailed on and in mid-August made an even more important discovery, or more accurately, rediscovery. In finding what Ross’s charts told him was undisputedly Baffin Bay, he realized that he was entering what Barrow believed was one of the gateways to discovering the passage. And after two centuries, he was confirming the fact that William Baffin had indeed discovered this important body of water. Baffin had long been one of Ross’s heroes and later he would write of the satisfaction he derived in proving wrong those who, for so long, had doubted Baffin’s accomplishment. (The existence of Baffin Bay had the subject of controversy since the early seventeenth century; see note, page 258.)
    â€œIn re-discovering Baffin’s Bay,” he wrote, “I have derived great additional pleasure from the reflection I have placed in a fair light before the Public, the merits of a worthy and able Navigator [William Baffin]; whose fate, like that of many others, it has not only been to have lost, by a combination of untoward circumstances, the opportunity of acquiring during his life-time the fame he deserved; but could he have lived to this period to have seen his discoveries expunged from the records of geography, and the bay with which his name is so fairly associated, treated as a phantom of the imagination.”
    After sailing through Baffin Bay without incident, Ross and Parry then followed the west coast of Greenland northward until, on August 19, they entered Smith Sound, distinguished by the two capes that lay on either side—which Ross named for his two ships. Two weeks later, they found the entrance to Lancaster Sound, another waterway that Barrow and others believed might be a vital link in the passage.
    Shortly before entering Lancaster Sound, Ross had mistakenly thought that he had spotted a large body of land, one of several mirages that he had experienced during the voyage. But Lancaster Sound was not a mirage. Parry, in particular, was now convinced that the great prize was before them. Noting in his journal that the current in the sound flowed exactly as it did in the open ocean, he wrote: “It is impossible to remark this circumstance without feeling a hope that it may be caused by this inlet being a passage into a sea to the westward of it.”
    Ross however was not sure. Thirty miles up the sound, with Parry sailing some leagues behind him, his doubts, he believed, were confirmed. Peering off into the distance through a break in the fog he spotted a long range of connected, formidable mountains that completely blocked any further passage. Later in his published account of the voyage, Ross