There is not much time for travelling in autumn.  The days grow very short and very cold.  But what, days there were were spent in sending out carts and sledges with depots of provisions, which the parties of the next spring could use.  Different officers were already assigned to different lines of search in spring.  On their journeys they would be gone three months and more, with a party of some eight men,—­dragging a sled very like a Yankee wood-sled with their instruments and provisions, over ice and snow.  To extend those searches as much as possible, and to prepare the men for that work when it should come, advanced depots were now sent forward in the autumn, under the charge of the gentlemen who would have to use them in the spring.

One of these parties, the “South line of Melville Island” party, was under a spirited young officer Mr. Mecham, who had tried such service in the last expedition.  He had two of “her Majesty’s sledges,” “The Discovery” and “The Fearless,” a depot of twenty days’ provision to be used in the spring, and enough for twenty-five days’ present use.  All the sledges had little flags, made by some young lady friends of Sir Edward Belcher’s.  Mr. Mecham’s bore an armed hand and sword on a white ground, with the motto, “Per mare, per terram, per glaciem” Over mud, land, snow, and ice they carried their depot, and were nearly back, when, on the 12th of October, 1852, Mr. Mecham made the great discovery of the expedition.

On the shore of Melville Island, above Winter Harbor, is a great sandstone boulder, ten feet high, seven or eight broad, and twenty and more long, which is known to all those who have anything to do with those regions as “Parry’s sandstone,” for it stood near Parry’s observatory the winter he spent here, and Mr. Fisher, his surgeon, cut on a flat face of it this inscription:—­

HIS BRITANNIC MAJESTY’S
SHIPS HECLA AND GRIPER,
COMMANDED BY
W.E.  PARRY AND MR. LIDDON,
WINTERED IN THE ADJACENT
HARBOR 1819-20. 
A. FISHER, SCULPT.

It was a sort of God Terminus put up to mark the end of that expedition, as the Danish gentlemen tell us our Dighton rock is the last point of Thorfinn’s expedition to these parts.  Nobody came to read Mr. Fisher’s inscription for thirty years and more,—­a little Arctic hare took up her home under the great rock, and saw the face of man for the first time when, on the 5th of June, 1851, Mr. McClintock, on his first expedition this way, had stopped to see whether possibly any of Franklin’s men had ever visited it.  He found no signs of them, had not so much time as Mr. Fisher for stone-cutting, but carved the figures 1851 on the stone, and left it and the hare.  To this stone, on his way back to the “Resolute,” Mr. Mecham came again (as we said) on the 12th of October, one memorable Tuesday morning, having been bidden to leave a record there.  He went on in advance of his party, meaning to cut 1852 on the stone.  On top of it was a