Baffin Land enters the novel as a distant, uncertain destination rather than a fully depicted setting. When a priest considers where Henry Drax may have gone, he imagines him among the northern tribes of Baffin Land, beyond the reach of those searching for him. The region thus marks both a point on the expedition’s Arctic horizon and the limit of what the survivors can know about Drax’s fate.

A region beyond the search

The clearest reference to Baffin Land comes after the priest hears that Drax wanted a sledge in order to escape. He reasons that Drax must have travelled north and may have fallen in with the region’s northern tribes, whom he describes as beyond the authority of outsiders. If so, the priest believes, there would be no way to discover what had become of him. He offers two possibilities rather than a confirmed account: Drax may be dead, or he may have exchanged the sledge for shelter and be waiting for spring. The location turns the escape into an unresolved possibility, not a reported journey with a known end.

The surrounding Arctic voyage

The novel establishes the wider northern setting through the whaling expedition’s passage and work. Sailing north from Lerwick, the ships endure fog, sleet, and gales before reaching sea ice near Jan Mayen Island. The crew hunt seals from five boats, and Arthur Brownlee estimates that four hundred skins could yield nine tons of oil. Later, by the last week of June, the ships enter the North Water, where Black strikes the first whale of the season. These episodes establish the expedition’s movement into ice-bound waters and the commercial labor that draws the crew north, without identifying each hunting ground as Baffin Land itself.

Further north, bad weather and dense ice delay the ships near the entrance to Pond’s Bay, after they pass Jones Sound and Cape Horsburgh. The captains wait for the wind to change while ice obstructs their progress. In another dangerous encounter with the moving pack, the crew cut an ice dock for protection, using teams, pulleys, and fourteen-foot saws to divide six-foot-thick ice. Such scenes make the Arctic an active constraint on travel and survival; they provide the environmental context for the priest’s speculation about a refuge farther north.

Distance, survival, and uncertainty

The loss of the Hastings sharpens the sense of isolation. The following afternoon, the survivors find a capsized whaleboat and a long trail of empty blubber casks and broken timbers. With no sign of survivors, Patrick Sumner recognizes that their best hope of rescue has disappeared. Otto plots a route toward Pond’s Bay, while Cavendish says they may have to winter over if they find no other ship. Against this background of uncertain rescue and enforced wintering, Baffin Land signifies a further reach beyond immediate shipboard knowledge.

The priest’s conjecture leaves Henry Drax alive somewhere in the north as a possibility Sumner cannot dismiss. Baffin Land is therefore not presented as the scene of Drax’s confirmed arrival, nor does the novel resolve whether he found shelter there. Its narrative force comes from that gap: it is a place associated with possible refuge, but also with the survivors’ inability to follow, verify, or control what happens beyond their Arctic world.