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He did not die. He got a few hours’ sleep, felt better and started again, but had the discouragement of finding such tokens of an open strait the last year that he felt sure that the ship he was going to look for would be gone. One morning, he had been off for game for the dogs unsuccessfully, and, when he came back to his men, learned that they had seen seventeen deer. After them goes Pim; finds them to be three hares, magnified by fog and mirage, and their long ears answering for horns. This same day they got upon the Bay of Mercy. No ship in sight! Right across it goes the Lieutenant to look for records; when, at two in the afternoon, Robert Hoile sees something black up the bay. Through the glass the Lieutenant makes it out to be a ship. They change their direction at once. Over the ice towards her! He leaves the sledge at three and goes on. How far it seems! At four he can see people walking about, and a pile of stones and flag-staff on the beach. Keep on, Pim; shall one never get there? At five he is within a hundred yards of her, and no one has seen him. But just then the very persons see him who ought to! Pim beckons, waves his arms as the Esquimaux do in sign of friendship. Captain McClure and his lieutenant Haswell are “taking their exercise,” the chief business of those winters, and at last see him! Pim is black as Erebus from the smoke of cooking in the little tent. McClure owns, not to surprise only, but to a twinge of dismay. “I paused in my advance,” says he, “doubting who or what it could be, a denizen of this or the other world.” But this only lasts a moment. Pim speaks. Brave man that he can. How his voice must have choked, as if he were in a dream. “I am Lieutenant Pim, late of ‘Herald.’ Captain Kellett is at Melville Island.” Well-chosen words, Pim, to be sent in advance over the hundred yards of floe! Nothing about the “Resolute,”–that would have confused them. But “Pim,” “Herald,” and “Kellett” were among the last signs of England they had seen,–all this was intelligible. An excellent little speech, which the brave man had been getting ready, perhaps, as one does a telegraphic despatch, for the hours that he had been walking over the floe to her. Then such shaking hands, such a greeting. Poor McClure could not speak at first. One of the men at work got the news on board; and up through the hatches poured everybody, sick and well, to see the black stranger, and to hear his news from England. It was nearly three years since they had seen any civilized man but themselves.

The 28th of July, three years before, Commander McClure had sent his last despatch to the Admiralty. He had then prophesied just what in three years he had almost accomplished. In the winter of 1850 he had discovered the Northwest Passage. He had come round into one branch of it, Banks Straits, in the next summer; had gladly taken refuge on the Bay of Mercy in a gale; and his ship had never left it since. Let it be said, in passing, that most likely she is there now. In his last despatches he had told the Admiralty not to be anxious about him if he did not arrive home before the autumn of 1854. As it proved, that autumn he did come with all his men, except those whom he had sent home before, and those who had died. When Pim found them, all the crew but thirty were under orders for marching, some to Baffin’s Bay, some to the Mackenzie River, on their return to England. McClure was going to stay with the rest, and come home with the ship, if they could; if not, by sledges to Port Leopold, and so by a steam-launch which he had seen left there for Franklin in 1849. But the arrival of Mr. Pim put an end to all these plans. We have his long despatch to the Admiralty explaining them, finished only the day before Pim arrived. It gives the history of his three years’ exile from the world,–an exile crowded full of effective work,–in a record which gives a noble picture of the man. The Queen has made him Sir Robert Le Mesurier McClure since, in honor of his great discovery.