138 : Polar Explorations. 
his favorite object, that of welcoming — Beechy to - 
Polar Sea. That officer in command of the Blossom, 
n ordered to wait for him at Kotzebue’s Inlet, re 
sing through Bhering’s Strait from the Pacific. 
e brief summer permitted no further progress, and 
Capt. Frankie turned his course towards Fort Franklin, after 
tracing “ three hundred and seventy four miles of coast from 
the mouth of the McKenzie, without discovering one inlet or 
harbor, where a ship could find shelter; the most miserab e, 
dreary and uninteresting coast in any part of the world, 
The — — violent storms, and met with =a 
. Esquim imaux several times on their return, but reached Fort 
Franklin in catety, where the detachment under Dr. Richard- 
son had previously arrived after a successful voyage of five 
hundred miles east, to the mouth of the Coppermine river. 
Although geographical discovery was the primary object of 
the enterprise, the officers omitted no opportunity to collect 
materials, and make observations connected with science. 
An ig of extraordinary scientific devotion occurred in 
un assistant botanist. This indefatigable en- 
iHiebiat, voluntarily spent a winter alone in the recesses of 
the Rocky Mountains s sheltered from the inclemency of the 
weather only by a hut made of the branches of trees. In this 
situation he anadiod for subsistence from day to day on an 
Indian hunter, and being without books he had no means of 
abating the dreariness of his solitude, except an occasional 
lonely walk, on wooden shoes, over the untracked deserts of 
snow, in pursuit of the objects connected with his favorite 
science. 
The greatest degree of cold, experienced this winter, was 
on the 7th of February, when it. was 58° below zero, - 
lowest temperature which has been at any time observe 
the Hyperborean regions 
The painful and dangerous journeys conducted by Capt. 
Franklin have yielded valuable contributions to science, and 
enlarged the boundaries of geographical knowledge. The 
survey of thirteen er miles, being within eleven degrees 
ai -Cape on the west, and about four hundred and seven- 
m Melville aasls on the east, with the trending of 
~~ coasts towards those points, lead to the belief of a continu- 
ous land shore on the American continent, stretching from 
Bhering’s strait to Baffin’s Bay, where there is a probable 
communication under the ice of those frozen seas between 
the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. 
