In 1810 he gained his epaulet, and joined the _Alexandria_ frigate, in which, after serving in the Baltic, he made his first acquaintance with polar ice between North Cape and Bear Island; and he subsequently joined the _La Hogue_ at Halifax. In 1814 he commanded a boat in a successful expedition up the Connecticut river, for which service he received a medal. Three years later he was recalled to England in consequence of the severe illness of his father, who had been seized with a paralytic stroke. His father’s illness and his own despair of promotion made this the gloomiest period of our young hero’s life. But dark is the hour before the dawn, and an incident occurred which threw a gleam of hope upon his professional prospects, and proved the forerunner to his future success. At the close of 1817 he wrote to a friend on the subject of an expedition that was about starting to explore the River Congo. The letter was written, but not posted, when his eye fell on a paragraph in the newspaper relative to an expedition about to be fitted out to the northern regions. He seized the pen, and added, by way of postscript, that, as far as he was concerned, “hot or cold it was all one to him, Africa or the Pole.” This letter was shown to Mr. Barrow, the then Secretary of the Admiralty, and in a few days he was appointed to the command of the _Alexander_, discovery ship, under the orders of Commander John Ross, as recorded in the first voyage of the present series. [Illustration: THE NORTH CAPE.] In 1819-20 Parry made a second voyage to the Arctic, this being the first, however, in which he had the chief command. The _Hecla_ and the _Griper_ were the vessels employed, and the expedition left the river on May 11th, reaching Davis’s Strait at the end of June, where icebergs of large size and in great numbers were encountered. Fifty or sixty _per diem_ was not an unusual allowance, and Parry counted eighty-eight large ones from the crow’s nest on one occasion, besides a profusion of smaller ones. Some most important explorations in Sir James Lancaster’s Sound were made, and the land which Ross had supposed extended across the bottom of this inlet was found to be open water. The expedition sailed across the site of the Croker Mountains, as has been before mentioned. Barrow’s Strait, Wellington Channel, Melville Island, and many others, were first discovered and named on this voyage. CHAPTER XVIII. PARRY’S EXPEDITIONS (_continued_).