VIII. On hourly observations of the magnetic declination, made by Captain Rochfort Maguire, R. N., and the officers of H. M. ship ‘Plover,’ in 1852, 1853 and 1854, at point barrow, on the shores of the Polar Sea

Point Barrow is the most northern cape of that part of the American continent which lies between Behring Strait and the Mackenzie River. It was the station, from the summer of 1852 to the summer of 1854, of H. M. S. ‘Plover,’ furnished with supplies of provisions, &c. for Sir John Franklin’s ships, or for their crews, had they succeeded in making their way through the land-locked and ice-encumbered channel by which they sought to effect a passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In this most dreary, and apparently uninteresting abode, Captain Maguire and his officers happily found an occupation in observing and recording, for seventeen months unremittingly, the hourly variations of the magnetic declination and of the concomitant auroral phenomena, in a locality which is perhaps one of the most important on the globe for such investigations.