138 Polar Explorations. 



his favorite object, that of welcoming Capt. Beechy to the 

 Polar Sea. That officer in command of the Blossom, had 

 been ordered to wait for him at Kotzebue's Inlet, after pas- 

 sin;^; through Bhermg's Strait from the Pacific. 



But the brief summer permitted no further progress, and 

 Capt. Franklin 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 miserable, 

 dreary and uninteresting coast in any part of the world." 



They experienced violent storms, and met with hostile 

 Esquimaux several times on their return, but reached Fort 

 Franklin in safety, where the detachment under Dr. Richard- 

 son hud 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 example of extraordinary scientific devotion occurred in 

 Mr. Drummond, assistant botanist. This indefatigable en- 

 thusiast, voluntarily spent a winter alone in the recesses of 

 the Rocky Mountains, sheltered from the inclemency of the 

 weather only by a hut made of the branches of trees. In this 

 situation he depended 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, the 

 lowest temperature which has been at any time observed in 

 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 hundred miles, being within eleven degrees 

 of Icy-Cape on the west, and about four hundred and seven- 

 ty from Melville peninsula on the east, with the trending of 

 the 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. 



