which confined him to his bed for some weeks. On the 26th of May, the whole of the surviving officers and men, with the exception of Adam, who had formed an alliance with the Copper Indians at Fort Providence, embarked for Chipewyan, where the remainder of the Canadians, then only three in number, were discharged. Captain Franklin, Lieutenant Back, Dr. Richardson, John Hepburn, and Augustus, the Esquimaux, returned to York Factory, on the 14th of July. “Thus,” says the commander of the expedition, “terminated our long, fatiguing, and disastrous travels in North America, having journeyed by water and land (including our navigation of the Polar Sea), 5550 miles.”
Captain Franklin obtained post rank, Nov. 20th, 1822; and married, Aug. l6th, 1823, Eleanor Anne, youngest daughter of William Porden, Esq. of Berners Street, London. In April following, Dr, Richardson was appointed Surgeon of the Chatham division of royal marines; and, about the same period, Lieutenant Back proceeded to the Leeward Islands’ station, in the Superb 74; Captain Sir Thomas Staines. The manner in which these highly distinguished travellers were next employed will be seen by the following extract from Captain Franklin’s “Narrative of a Second Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea:”
“His Majesty’s Government having, towards the close of 1923, determined upon another attempt to effect a northern passage by sea between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, and Captain Parry, the commander of the two preceding expeditions, having been again entrusted with its execution, success, as far as ability, enterprise, and experience could ensure it, appeared likely to he the result. Yet, as the object was one for which Great Britain had thought proper to contend for upwards of three centuries, it seemed to me that it might be desirable to pursue it by more ways than one; I therefore ventured to submit a plan for an expedition overland to the month of the Mackenzie River, and thence, by sea, to the north-western extremity of America, with the combined object, also, of surveying the country between the Mackenzie and Copper-mine Rivers.
“I was well aware of the sympathy excited in the English public by the sufferings of those engaged in the former overland expedition, and of the humane repugnance of Government to expose others to a like fate; but I was enabled to show satisfactorily that, in the proposed course, similar
