On 21st September, Fort Franklin was reached after three months' absence. Dr. Richardson had already returned after a successful coast voyage of some eight hundred miles.
When he had left Franklin he had, on board the Dolphin, accompanied by the Union, sailed along the unknown coast eastward. Like Franklin's party, his expedition had also suffered from fogs, gales, and mosquitoes, but they had made their way on, naming inlets, capes, and islands as they passed. Thus we find Russell Inlet, Point Bathurst, Franklin's Bay, Cape Parry, the Union and Dolphin Straits, named after the two little ships, where the Dolphin was nearly wrecked between two masses of ice. They had reached Fort Franklin in safety just before Franklin's party, and, being too late to think of getting home this year, they were all doomed to another winter at the Fort. They reached England on 26th September 1827, after an absence of two years and a half.
Franklin had failed to find the North-West Passage, but he and Richardson had discovered a thousand miles of North American coast, for which he was knighted and received the Paris Geographical Society's medal for "the most important acquisition to geographical knowledge" made during the year. It was a curious coincidence that the two Arctic explorers, Franklin and Parry, both arrived in England the same month from their various expeditions, and appeared at the Admiralty within ten minutes of one another.
CHAPTER LIV
PARRY'S POLAR VOYAGE
Parry had left England the preceding April in an attempt to reach the North Pole by means of sledges over the ice. To this end he had sailed to Spitzbergen in his old ship the Hecla, many of his old shipmates sailing with him. They arrived off the coast of Spitzbergen about the middle of May 1827. Two boats had been specially built in England, covered with waterproof canvas and lined with felt. The Enterprise and Endeavour had bamboo masts and paddles, and were constructed to go on sledges, drawn by reindeer, over the ice.
"Nothing," says Parry, "can be more beautiful than the training of the Lapland reindeer. With a simple collar of skin round his neck, a single trace of the same material attached to the sledge and passing between his legs, and one rein fastened like a halter round his neck, this intelligent and docile animal is perfectly under the command of an experienced driver, and performs astonishing journeys over the softest snow. Shaking the rein over his back is the only whip that is required."
Leaving the Hecla in safe harbour on the Spitzbergen coast, Parry and James Ross, a nephew of John Ross, the explorer, with food for two months, started off in their two boat-sledges for the north. They made a good start; the weather was calm and clear, the sea smooth as a mirror—walruses lay in herds on the ice, and, steering due north, they made good progress.