Parry's Flagstaff Site near Igloolik, Northwest Territories

Abstract

William Edward Parry's Second voyage for the discovery of a north-west passage, during the years 1821 to 1823, took him to the shores of Melville Peninsula in Canada's Eastern Arctic. The expedition spent its first winter on a small island east of Repulse Bay, appropriately named Winter Island by Parry. The second winter was passed on Igloolik Island at the eastern end of an ice-strewn strait separating the north shore of Melville Peninsula from Baffin Island. Parry was to name this strait Fury and Hecla in commemoration of the two ships then under his command. In terms of its stated exploration goal - the discovery of a northern sea route from the Atlantic to the Pacific - the voyage was a failure. ... The expedition, however, was not without its achievements. The many scientific investigations carried out by Parry and his officers added considerably to contemporary European knowledge of the lands and sea to the north of Hudson Bay. But the enduring legacy of the expedition is found in the accounts of early 19th-century Inuit life published in 1824 by Parry and George Francis Lyon, commander of the Hecla, on their return to England. These remarkable accounts, together with the unpublished journals of William Harvey Hooper, purser of the Fury, William Mogg, clerk of the Hecla, and George Fisher, the expedition's astronomer, are among the first truly detailed descriptions we have of Inuit in Canada's Eastern Arctic. ...