For myself, looking only at the facts, and carefully discarding every deduction that might be prompted by sympathy rather than reason, my journal reminds me that I did not see in these signs the evidence of a lost party. The party was evidently in motion; but it might be that it was a detachment, engaged in making observations, or in exploring with a view to the operations of the spring, while the ships were locked in winter quarters at Cape Riley or Beechy, which had returned on board before the opening of the ice. I may add, as not without some bearing on the fortunes of this party, whatever may have been its condition or purposes, that the vacant water-spaces around us at this time were teeming with animal life. After passing Beechy, we saw seal disporting in great flocks, rising out of the water as high as their middle, like boys in swimming; the white whale, the first we had seen, to the extent of thirty-eight separate shoals; the narwhal, or sea-unicorn; and, finally, that marine pachyderm, the tusky walrus. These last were always crowded on small tongues of ice, whose purity they marred not a little--grim-looking monsters, reminding me of the stage hobgoblins, something venerable and semi-Egyptian withal. We passed so close as to have several shots at them. They invariably rose after plunging, and looked snortingly around, as if to make fight. Polar bears were numerous beyond our previous experience, and the Arctic fox and hare abounded. If we add to these the crowding tenants of the air, the Brent goose, which now came in great cunoid flocks from the north and north by east, the loons, the mollemokes, and the divers, we may form an estimate of the means of human subsistence in these seas. CHAPTER II ON the 27th, the chances of this narrow and capricious navigation had gathered five of the searching vessels, under three different commands, within the same quarter of a mile--Sir John Ross', Penny's, and our own. Both Ross and Penny had made the effort to push through the sound to the west, but found a great belt of ice, reaching in an almost regular crescent from Leopold's Island across to the northern shore, about half a mile from the entrance of the channel. Captain Ommanney, with the _Intrepid_ and _Assistance_, had been less fortunate. He had attempted to break his way through the barrier, but it had closed on him, and he was now fast, within fifteen miles of us, to the west.