oo 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.

Next day, however, they were stopped by ice. Instead of finding a smooth,
level plain over which the reindeer could draw their sledges with ease,
they found broken, rugged, uneven ice, which nothing but the keen
enthusiasm of the explorer could have faced. The reindeer were useless,
and they had to be relinquished; i