The _Victory_ in the short summer of 1830 sailed a few miles further south and spent the winter in Victoria Harbour, to be there abandoned in May, 1832. Ross in his boats made for Fury Beach, where, at Somerset House, as he called it, he passed the following winter. On the 26th of August, 1833, when in his boats off the eastern mouth of Lancaster Sound, he was picked up by the _Isabella_, his old ship, and in her he reached the Humber in October of that year after four successive winters in the ice, having been enabled to make so long a stay by his fortunate find of the stores left by Parry.
[Illustration: H.M.S. "TERROR" LIFTED BY ICE]
In 1824 Captain Lyon was sent out in the _Griper_ to winter at Repulse Bay, and thence crossing the isthmus described by the Eskimos continue along to Franklin's Point Turnagain; but the _Griper_ was nearly wrecked in Rowe's Welcome and did not reach Wager River. The discoveries of Ross led to the renewal of this attempt by Captain Back in the _Terror_ in 1836. He was to go to Wager River or Repulse Bay, and then make his way into Prince Regent Inlet, and so west; but he became imprisoned in the ice off Cape Comfort during one of the severest winters known. Drifting up Frozen Strait amid most perilous experiences, the ship, lifted high above sea-level by pressure, lay at times almost horizontal. Once "they beheld," he says, "the strange and appalling spectacle of what may be fitly termed a submerged berg, fixed low down, with one end to the ship's side, while the other, with the purchase of a long lever advantageously placed at a right angle with the keel, was slowly rising towards the surface. Meanwhile, those who happened to be below, finding everything falling, rushed or clambered on deck, where they saw the ship on her beam-ends, with the lee boats touching the water, and felt that a few moments only trembled between them and eternity."
Day after day the _Terror_ defied the persistent effort of the ice to smash her, but suffering much in almost every timber she withstood it sufficiently to keep together. For four months she was entirely out of water, and when at last she was free, Back wrapped her up as best he could, and brought her home with the water pouring into her so that the men were so wearied out that they could hardly have continued at the pumps another day; and he ran her ashore in Lough Swilly only just in time. Upwards of twenty feet of her keel, together with ten feet of the stern-post, were driven over more than three and a half feet on one side, leaving a frightful opening astern for the free ingress of water. The forefoot was entirely gone; numbers of bolts were either loosened or broken; and when, besides this, the strained and twisted state of the ship's frame was considered, there was not one on board who did not express astonishment that they had ever floated across the Atlantic.