Parry’s second voyage involved two year’s of winterovering in Winter Harbour, including a number of interactions with natives. There is little here on reading,unlike Lyon’s earlier private journal.
p. xviii: It was highly gratifying to observe the eager assiduity with which, during two successive winters of long and tedious confinement, they followed up the more sedentary occupations of learning to read and write, with which they were furnished; and it is, I confess, with no ordinary feelings of pleasure that I record the fact, that on the return of the Expedition to England, there was not an individual belonging to it who could not read his Bible.
p. 148, Decemb. 1821: What with reading, writing, makng and calculating observations, observing the various natural phenomena, and taking the exercise necessary to preserve our health, nobody I believe ever felt any symptoms of ennui during our continuance in winter quarters.
Among the recreations which afforded the highest gratification to several among us, I may mention the musical parties we were enabled to muster, and which assembled on stated evenings throughout the winter, alternately in Captain Lyon’s cabin and my own… it has often furnished us with the most pleasurable sensations which our situation was capable of affording: for independently of the mere gratification affirded to the ear by music, there is perhaps scarcely a person in the world ;really fond of it, in whose mind, its sound is not more or less connected with “his far-distant home.” There are always some remembrances which…can still occasionally transport us into the social circle of our friends at home, in spite of the oceans that roll between us.
p. 196-98, March 25, 1822, long passage on the cartographic skills of a native woman, Iligliuk, and other Inuit, while still calling them savages. Parry points out her mistakes, but then refines the inquiry to result in a more accurate but smaller map of Winter Island.
p. 273-74, on meeting while sledging with some travelling Ilulik natives: The evening was passed in dealing out our information from the southward, and never did any arrival excite more anxious inquiries than those we were now obliged to answer. So intimate was the knowledge we possessed respecting many of their relations, that by the help of a memorandum book in which these had been inserted, I believed almost at times excited a degree of superstitious alarm in their minds. This sort of gossip and incessant chattering and laughing continued till near midnight, when the numerous visitors in our tents began to retire to their own and to leave us to our repose.
p. 536: It is here as a social being, as a husband and the father of a family, promoting within his own little sphere the benefit of that community in which Providence has cast his lot, that the moral character of a savage is truly to be sought; and who can turn without horror from the Esquimaux, peaceably seated after a day of honest labour with his wife and children in their snow-built hut, to the self-willed and vindictive Indian, wantonly plunging his dagger into the bosom of the helpless woman, whom nature bids him cherish and protect!
p. 551-55, on the language of the Esquimaux, remarking on the great similarity of the various tribes, from Greenland to far inland in the northern Arctic. In the Esquimaux Vocabulary at the end of the volume (p. 560), Book is given as Titterow-yak.