From here he made his dash for the Pole. He had with him two boats of his own design, seven feet in beam, twenty in length. On each side of the keel was a strong runner, shod with steel, upon which the boat stood upright on the ice. They were so built that they would have floated as bags had they been stove in. On ash and hickory timbers, an inch by an inch and a half thick, placed a foot apart, with a half-timber of smaller size between each, was stretched a casing of waterproof canvas tarred on the outer side and protected by a skin of fir three-sixteenths of an inch thick, over this came a sheet of stout felt, and over all a skin of oak of the same thickness as the fir, each boat weighing about fourteen hundredweight—that is the hull, as launched. One of these boats was named the _Enterprise_, the other the _Endeavour_. They were intended to be hauled by reindeer, but the state of the ice rendered this impracticable and the men did the work themselves. Parry took command of the _Enterprise_, the other being in charge of Lieutenant James Clark Ross; and, altogether, officers and men numbered twenty-eight. From Little Table Island, where they left a reserve as they had done at Walden, they started for the north—two heavy boats laden with food for seventy days and clothing for twenty-eight men, with a compact equipment including light sledges, travelling in a sea crowded or covered with ice in every form, large and small, over which they were dragged up and down hummocks, round and among crags and ridges, along surfaces of every kind of ruggedness, of every slope and irregularity, the few flat stretches broken with patches of sharp crystals or waist-deep snow; through lanes and pools of water with frequent ferryings and transhipments, in sunshine and fog, and, strange to say, frequently in pouring rain. They travelled by night and rested by day, though, of course, there was daylight all the time. "The advantages of this plan," says Parry, "which was occasionally deranged by circumstances, consisted, first in our avoiding the intense and oppressive glare from the snow during the time of the sun's greatest altitude, so as to prevent in some degree the painful inflammation in the eyes called snow-blindness which is common in all snowy countries. We also thus enjoyed greater warmth during the hours of rest and had a better chance of drying our clothes; besides which no small advantage was derived from the snow being harder at night for travelling. When we rose in the evening we commenced our day by prayers, after which we took off our sleeping dresses and put on those for travelling, the former being made of camlet lined with racoon skin, and the latter of strong blue, box cloth. We made a point of always putting on the same stockings and boots for travelling in, whether they had dried during the day or not, and I believe it was only in five or six instances that they were not either still wet or hard frozen." When