His famous voyage to Melville Island was due to the influence of Sir John Barrow. Barrow, to whom more than any other man this country owes its position in Arctic story, was born in a small thatched cottage at Dragley Beck, near Ulverston, in North Lancashire, in 1764, and, in a remarkable course of promotion by merit, became second secretary of the Admiralty for forty years under twelve or thirteen different naval administrations, Whig and Tory; being so unmistakably the right man in the right place that he was only dispensed with once—on a change of First Lords—and then was reinstated the next year. When he was seventeen he was given the opportunity of a voyage in a Greenland whaler, which he accepted, and that was his only Arctic experience; but even when with Macartney in China and South Africa, he kept up his interest in the north, and in 1817, when at the Admiralty, proposed to Lord Melville his plan for two voyages of discovery, one to the north and the other to the north-west, which opened the new era of Polar exploration. [Illustration: Yours very truly John Barrow] The voyage to the north was that of Buchan and Franklin in the _Dorothea_ and _Trent_; that to the north-west was undertaken by John Ross in the _Isabella_ and William Edward Parry in the _Alexander_. Of this we need only say here that on their return from the north of Baffin Bay, Ross and Parry coasted down the west side and sailed into Lancaster Sound for a considerable distance until Ross—who seems to have had the mountain-finding eye and an unenviable gift for missing straits—declared that it ended in a range of mountains which he appropriately named Croker's; and, that there should be no mistake about them, he gave a very pretty picture of them as a full-page plate in his book. Parry, however, saw no mountains and took the liberty of saying so to Barrow when he reported himself at the Admiralty, the result being the despatch of Parry's expedition in the _Hecla_ and _Griper_ which left Yarmouth on the 12th of May, 1819, and, for the first time after leaving the coast of Norfolk, dropped anchor in the bay named after them in Melville Island, on the 5th of September. Parry, before his voyage in the _Alexander_, had had Arctic experience while lieutenant of the _Alexandria_ frigate engaged in protecting the Spitsbergen whale fisheries, and knew thoroughly what he was about. For instance, he worked his crews in three watches, and had both his vessels rigged as barques as the most convenient rig among ice, though the _Griper_, a strong, slow gunboat, was rather too small to be so treated, being only about half the tonnage of the _Hecla_, whose measurement was under four hundred. Had she been a little speedier more work might have been done; but what was done was magnificent.