William Parry, sailing in the Arctic in…
July 1819 CE
William Parry, sailing in the Arctic in a quest for the fabled Northwest Passage through North America on July 26, 1819, guides the ships HMS Hecla and HMS Griper through an iceberg-laden passage that will later be named the Parry Channel.
William Parry reaches longitude 112°51' W in Baffin Bay after discovering Barrow Strait, Prince Regent Inlet, Viscount Melville Sound, M'Clure Strait, and Wellington Channel.
This will be the furthest west attained by any single-season voyage for one hundred and fifty years.
Parry had served on the North American station from 1813 to 1817, and in 1818 had received command of the brig Alexander in the Arctic expedition under Captain (afterwards Sir) John Ross.
This expedition had returned to England without having made any new discoveries but Parry, confident, as he expressed it, "that attempts at Polar discovery had been hitherto relinquished just at a time when there was the greatest chance of succeeding", in the following year had obtained the chief command of a new Arctic expedition; consisting of the two ships HMS Griper and HMS Hecla.
Born in Bath, the son of Dr. Caleb Hillier Parry and Sarah Rigby, and educated at King Edward's School, Bath, he had joined the flagship of Admiral Cornwallis in the Channel fleet as a first-class volunteer at the age of thirteen, became a midshipman in 1806, and in 1810 received promotion to the rank of lieutenant in the frigate Alexander, which spent the next three years in the protection of the Spitsbergen whale fishery.
He had taken advantage of this opportunity for the study and practice of astronomical observations in northern latitudes, and afterwards published the results of his studies in a small volume on Nautical Astronomy by Night (1816).