1. The equipment of a sledge expedition on a large scale demands an amount of circumspection and precision which experience alone can give, and its safety and success may be endangered by the neglect of apparently trifling precautions. At a distance from the ship the most formidable dangers may arise, from allowing the matches to become damp, from the leaking or the loss of a vessel containing spirit, from the setting fire to a tent, which only too probably may happen from the carelessness of the cook, to say nothing of those yet greater perils,—the inability of some of the party to march, the destruction of depôts of provisions by bears, or the breaking in of the sea. The first principle in fitting out such an expedition should be the rejection of everything not absolutely necessary for the support of life, the instruments only excepted; and the second, that the whole of the travelling gear should be of the most perfect and convenient form. The departure from these rules contributed, among other things, to the melancholy issue of the Franklin expedition. McClintock speaks most emphatically of the evils of over-loading with things not absolutely necessary. The success of an undertaking may be defeated by the neglect even of things apparently insignificant. Mojsejew’s sledge expedition along the coast of Novaya Zemlya in 1839 was a proof and illustration of this. It was wrecked within a few days by the snow-blindness of the entire party, caused by their want of snow-spectacles. If we except the journeys of the Russian explorers of the Siberian coast, carried out, however, at the sacrifice of the whole nomad population, and of all the dogs and reindeer of North Asia—from which to this day the exhausted country has not recovered—the merit of the organization of sledge expeditions belongs pre-eminently to the English. It was by Parry and James Ross that those experiments with sledges were begun, which have since been brought nearly to perfection by McClintock.[29] The method thus perfected serves to this day as a pattern to be imitated, as it enables a party of men, inured to hardships and fatigues, to pass many weeks without the help of those resources which only a ship in such icy wastes can afford. I will now endeavour to describe with sufficient detail the equipment of our sledges in the journeys we carried out.