the Atlantic.  I was desirous also of ascertaining the depth of water in this place, which was wanting to complete Lieutenant Sherer’s survey of it.  Finding the harbour an extremely convenient one for our purpose, we worked the ship in, and at four P.M. anchored in thirteen fathoms, but afterward shifted out to eighteen, on a bottom of soft mud.  Almost at the moment of our dropping the anchor, John Page, seaman of the Fury, departed this life:  he had for several months been affected with a scrofulous disorder, and had been gradually sinking for some time.

The funeral of the deceased being performed, we immediately commenced landing the casks and filling water; but, notwithstanding the large streams which, a short time before, had been running into the harbour, we could hardly obtain enough for our purpose by sinking a cask with holes in it.  This work, together with the entire restowage of all the holds, occupied the whole of the 29th and 30th, during which time Lieutenant Sherer was employed in completing the survey of the harbour, more especially the soundings, which the presence of the ice had before prevented.  These arrangements had just been completed, when the northeasterly wind died away, and was succeeded, on the morning of the 31st, by a light air from the northwest.  As soon as we had sent to ascertain that the sea was clear of ice on the outside, and that the breeze which blew in the harbour was the true one, we weighed and stood out, and before noon had cleared the shoals at the entrance.

Finding the wind at northwest in Prince Regent’s Inlet, we were barely able to lie along the eastern coast.  As the breeze freshened in the course of the day, a great deal of loose ice, in extensive streams and patches, came drifting down from the Leopold Islands, occasioning us some trouble in picking our way to the northward.  By carrying a press of sail, however, we were enabled, towards night, to get into clearer water, and by four A.M. on the 1st of September, having beat to windward of a compact body of ice which had fixed itself on the lee shore about Cape York, we soon came into a perfectly open sea in Barrow’s Strait, and were enabled to bear away to the eastward.  We now considered ourselves fortunate in having got out of harbour when we did, as the ice would probably have filled up every inlet on that shore in a few hours after we left it.

Being again favoured with a fair wind, we now stretched to the eastward, still in an open sea; and our curiosity was particularly excited to see the present situation of the ice in the middle of Baffin’s Bay, and to compare it with that in 1824.  This comparison we were enabled to make the more fairly, because the season at which we might expect to come to it coincided, within three or four days, with that in which we left it the preceding year.  The temperature of the sea-water now increased to 38 deg. soon after leaving the Sound, where it had generally been from 33 deg.