Ross owed much to Ikmallik, and really a good deal of the time of the expedition was spent in confirming the statements of that well-informed man. The west coast of Boothia was surveyed down to Bulow Bay; the east side from Cape Nicholas down to Cape Porter, including the crossing of the upper part of James Ross Strait, the discovery of Matty Island and the north-east coast of King William Land from Cape Landon, opposite Cape Porter—where Ross, as usual, missed a strait—westward to capes Franklin and Jane Franklin, within sight of which in the days that were coming, by one of those remarkable coincidences so frequent in the north, the _Erebus_ and _Terror_ were to meet their fate. The one conspicuous triumph of the expedition was the journey of James Ross to the site of the Magnetic North Pole, which he found on the western coast of Boothia on the 1st of June, 1831. In the younger Ross's own words, "the land at this place is very low near the coast, but it rises into ridges of fifty or sixty feet high about a mile inland. We could have wished that a place so important had possessed more of mark or note. It was scarcely censurable to regret that there was not a mountain to indicate a spot to which so much of interest must ever be attached; and I could even have pardoned any one among us who had been so romantic or absurd as to expect that the magnetic pole was an object as conspicuous and mysterious as the fabled mountain of Sinbad, that it even was a mountain of iron, or a magnet as large as Mont Blanc. But Nature had here erected no monument to denote the spot which she had chosen as the centre of one of her great and dark powers; and where we could do little ourselves towards this end, it was our business to submit, and to be content in noting by mathematical numbers and signs, as with things of far more importance in the terrestrial system, what we could but ill distinguish in any other manner.... We fixed the British flag on the spot and took possession of the North Magnetic Pole and its adjoining territory in the name of Great Britain and King William the Fourth. We had abundance of materials for building, in the fragments of limestone that covered the beach; and we therefore erected a cairn of some magnitude, under which we buried a canister containing a record of the interesting fact; only regretting that we had not the means of constructing a pyramid of more importance and of strength sufficient to withstand the assaults of time and of the Eskimos. Had it been a pyramid as large as that of Cheops, I am not quite sure that it would have done more than satisfy our ambition, under the feelings of that exciting day. The latitude of this spot is 70° 5´ 17˝, and its longitude 96° 46´ 45˝ west."