The attempt to find a north west passage by sea, from the Atlantic Ocean to Behring Strait, where farthest east meets farthest west, was abandoned until Commander John Ross, in modern times (1818), was sent out to prosecute further exploration in the Arctic. Throughout the nineteenth century, many intrepid voyages were made, with which the names of such men as Parry, Ross, Richardson, Rae and Franklin are associated. Prior to this wonderful epoch of dauntless adventure, all within the Arctic Circle upon the map was a blank. The entire geography of the Canadian arctic archipelago has been worked out, defined, charted, and named, since that time. Voyages of discovery were made in rapid succession, after Sir John Ross’s expedition in 1818, many of the leaders working in conjunction with the officials of the Hudson Bay Fur Trading Company, who were anxious to determine the extent and limits of the immense continent they controlled, now known as the North West Territories. Every name upon the arctic map, whether of sea, sound, inlet, strait, island, peninsula or cape, is a historical association with the personnel or the patrons of these numerous expeditions. All the islands of the Arctic Archipelago lying to the northward of the mainland of the continent, and the whole of Baffin Land, form part of the British possessions in North America by right of discovery. They were formally transferred to the Dominion of Canada by Order in Council of the Imperial Government on September 1st, 1880. An immense amount of scientific information was derived from all this hardship, endurance and enterprise. The story of Sir John Franklin alone is a deathless epic in the annals of this seafaring nation. And the whole field was opened up for the whalers, sealers, hunters and fishers, whose business it soon became to demonstrate that arctic exploration had a bearing on commerce and the hardier industries of maritime mankind. The whaling trade originated as early as the discoveries of Barentz and Hudson, but Sir John Ross opened up the northernmost waters of Baffin’s Bay to it, in recent times. The search for the North West Passage, indeed, proved abortive for many years, owing to the fact that the season in which it was possible to navigate in very high latitudes only lasted about seven weeks. The most experienced men, though, never gave up the theory of the probability of its existence. Half a century went by before the route was found at last. Captain McClure, in the search for the long-lost Franklin, achieved the discovery of two routes to the Behring Straits and the Pacific Ocean, in the autumn of the year 1850. Useless and futile as the discovery proved to be, who can sufficiently estimate and appraise all that has gone, of human worth and high resolve, of suffering and of life itself, to the making of it?