CONCLUSION AND RETURN 467 



hoped to reach to the eastward, he at last, with the greatest regret and 

 reluctance, gave orders to put about and return. 



While the expedition waited at Cape Bathurst, two of the Indian hunters 

 were sent away on the 12th to look for a deer. They failed to come into 

 camp at night, and it was feared they had been attacked and killed by their 

 traditional enemies, the Eskimos. Search parties were sent out on their 

 track, but nothing was seen of them till late on the afternoon of the 14th. 

 They staggered into the camp, shoeless, footsore, faint, and famishing. They 

 had broken the leg of a deer, and in the heat of the pursuit of the wounded 

 game had lost their way. They were told that their white allies were on 

 the point of setting out on the return journey without them, and they were 

 asked what they should have done in such a case. " We should have dug 

 a hole," said they, ''and lain down in it and died." 



With the details of the return journey of this unsuccessful expedition 

 which, sent out to seek for Sir John Franklin, failed to reach even the 

 borders of the region in which he was supposed to have been beset, it would 

 be uninteresting and profitless to concern ourselves. Like the outward trip, 

 the return journey was one of continuous discomfort and hard labour. 

 " Gales, rain, snow, shallow water, heavy ice, a freezing temperature, and 

 wretched food — these," says Hooper, "tell our tale comprehensively." On 

 the 23d August the voyagers passed thr^e islands, which they had discovered 

 in the easternmost channel of the Mackenzie on the outward voyage, and 

 named them respectively Beaufort, Hooper, and PuUen Islands. On the 

 31st, they fairly entered the Mackenzie, reached Fort M'Pherson on the 7th 

 September, Fort Good Hope on the 17th, and on the 5th October, Fort 

 Simpson, where Captain PuUen, Lieutenant Hooper, and two marines 

 remained during the winter, while the remainder of the party went on 

 inland to the fishing station on Great Slave Lake. 



After passing a dull and uneventful winter at Fort Simpson, PuUen and 

 Hooper set out from that post on the 5th June 1851, and ascended the 

 Mackenzie by easy stages. On the 20th June, they reached Fort Eesolu- 

 tion, the neatest and cleanest establishment they had yet seen, and on the 

 28th August reached York Factory, whence they sailed for England (9th 

 September) in one of the Hudson's Bay Company's sljips. They arrived in 

 England just in time to see the last of the Great Exhibition, where they 

 themselves took no mean rank among the numberless objects of interest. 



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