We must picture to ourselves the sort of work these brave men had to go through, to do full justice to their perseverance and courage,--day after day travelling on, dragging their sledges across the frozen strait, often in the face of biting winds, encamping night after night with simply a tent to shelter them and a spirit-lamp only with which to cook their food or to afford them warmth. Yet thus, during that eventful period in the history of Arctic discovery, were many hundred British seamen employed in different portions of the icy ocean, all nobly engaged in the search for their lost countrymen and brother sailors. Not only for month after month, but year after year,--the only interruption being the dark, long night of mid-winter, and the brief period of summer navigation,--when, amid icebergs and ice-fields, whirled here and there, tossed by storms, and urged impetuously on by currents, they forced their way onward, in the hope of gaining the open ocean in another hemisphere. At Winter Harbour Captain McClure found a large fragment of sandstone, with this inscription--"His Britannic Majesty's ships _Hecla_ and _Griper_, Commanders Parry and Lyddon, wintered in the adjacent harbour during the winter of 1819-20. _A. Fisher, sculpsit_." Lieutenant McClintock had left a notice of his visit on the previous year on the same fragment, and protected it by a large cairn. In this cairn Captain McClure now deposited his own despatches, giving a plan of the way he intended to proceed under the various circumstances which might occur. One portion especially is worthy of notice.