With considerable difficulty he succeeded in getting two small boats built at the Great Bear Lake, and, after a preliminary sledge-expedition to Wollaston Land, in which he covered no less than 1100 miles in thirty-one days, on June 15, 1851, he started off on the serious work of the year from Provision Station, Kendall River, whither the boats had been brought to meet him. Passing through Dease Strait he soon made Cape Colburn, and instantly set to work to examine the east coast of Victoria Land, much of which had never been visited by a civilised man before. His boats, however, had to be abandoned after a while, for a stiff northerly gale and packed ice made it impossible for him to use them, and he felt that he would do better if he pursued his journey on foot. The rugged limestone debris with which the shore was covered, however, made this mode of travelling exceedingly irksome, and, meeting with no better success inland, he was obliged to turn back after attaining lat. 70° 03´ long. 101° 25´ thus, though he did not know it, reaching a higher latitude than that in which the _Erebus_ and _Terror_ were abandoned. On his way home he found a boat’s stanchion and the butt-end of a small flagstaff, with a piece of rope attached to it in the form of a loop, which he rightly supposed to be relics of the Franklin expedition. He returned to Fort Confidence, at the eastern extremity of the Great Bear Lake, without misadventure, after a brilliant journey, in the course of which he had explored 725 miles of unknown coast-line in Wollaston and Victoria Lands. For this service the Royal Geographical Society awarded him the founder’s gold medal. His next journey was undertaken not as an agent of the Government, but as a servant of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and his mission was to explore the west coast of Boothia, of which very little was known at that time.