236 
CAPT. COLLINSON— ROYAL AWARDS. 
[May 24 , 1858 . 
accessory performances, I speak with entire certainty in saying 
that his chief work (though yet uncompleted), the Survey of the 
American Coasts, Sounds, and Estuaries, in all their expansion, 
intricacies, and characteristics, admirably delineated, as if daguer- 
reotyped, in charts of extraordinary perfection, has earned for him 
a solid and enduring reputation in this, as in our own, hemisphere. 
“ I believe him, Sir, in every respect entitled to the high honour 
you confer by awarding this Medal, and am happy in being made 
by your distinguished Association the medium of its safe trans- 
mission.” 
The Founder’s or King William’s Medal has been decerned 
to Captain Richard Collinson, r.n., c.b., &c., &c., for having in 
Her Majesty’s ship Enterprise , though baffled by provoking calms 
and adverse winds, ultimately passed through Behring Straits in 
search of Sir John Franklin and his companions. Hampered by 
those glacial obstructions which every change of wind wafted 
against him, and greatly perplexed by the proofs occasionally found 
of his former companion, M‘Clure, being in advance, but without 
the slightest intimation of the course he had pursued, Captain 
Collinson deemed it advisable to follow the open water in shore, 
and thus penetrated farther to the eastward than any vessel had 
ever reached, approaching nearly to the point attained by the 
Hekla from the Atlantic in 1819. 
Though employed on a mission of pure humanity, Captain Col- 
linson was quite alive to the benefit commerce might derive from 
taking advantage of the now discovered resort of shoals of huge 
whales, seen from time to time disporting themselves in unvisited 
security ; and, therefore, this voyage has also the merit of extend- 
ing the field of that profitable fishery in the Arctic Seas . 
Captain Collinson ’s previous services as a surveyor (and he was 
with our late lamented President Admiral Beechey) in different 
latitudes, but more particularly on the coast of China — at Canton, 
Golongsoo, and especially when he surveyed the channel before 
Woosung, and surmounted all the difficulties in the navigation of 
the Yang-tse-kiang, during the advance of the British on the city 
of Chin-kiang-foo, are to be found in the Gazette of 1841 and 1842. 
His accurate description of his track left nothing to be desired. 
Captain Collinson’s astronomical observations, together with his 
contributions to the geography of Arctic America, have already 
appeared in the Society’s Journal, vol. xxv., and are highly appre- 
ciated for having corroborated and given a more fixed character to 
our knowledge of those regions. 
While carried forward by his great zeal and courage, and far 
