Still fogs and storms continued; the farther west they advanced, the denser grew the fog, till by the middle of August, winter seemed to have set in. The men had suffered much from the hard work of pulling and dragging the heavy boats; they also endured torments from countless swarms of mosquitoes. They were now some three hundred and seventy-four miles from the mouth of the Mackenzie River and only half-way to Icy Cape; but Franklin, with all his courage and with all his enthusiasm, dared not risk the lives of his men farther. "Return Reef" marks his farthest point west, and it was not till long after that he learnt that Captain Beechey, who had been sent in the _Blossom_ by way of Behring Strait, had doubled Icy Cape and was waiting for Franklin one hundred and sixty miles away. On 21st September, Fort Franklin was reached after three months' absence. Dr. Richardson had already returned after a successful coast voyage of some eight hundred miles. When he had left Franklin he had, on board the _Dolphin_, accompanied by the _Union_, sailed along the unknown coast eastward. Like Franklin's party, his expedition had also suffered from fogs, gales, and mosquitoes, but they had made their way on, naming inlets, capes, and islands as they passed. Thus we find Russell Inlet, Point Bathurst, Franklin's Bay, Cape Parry, the Union and Dolphin Straits, named after the two little ships, where the _Dolphin_ was nearly wrecked between two masses of ice. They had reached Fort Franklin in safety just before Franklin's party, and, being too 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.