In 1850 Captain M'Clure commenced the famous voyage which, though it led to the abandonment of the good ship _Investigator_, enabled him to be the first commander who really effected the North-west Passage. (Whether he was the first to _discover_ it, is a question on which much controversy has arisen.) Sailing down the Atlantic to Cape Horn, up the Pacific to Behring's Strait, and through the Frozen Sea to Banks Land, he there passed three frightfully severe winters, from the autumn of 1850 to the spring of 1853. There he quitted his trusty but ice-bound ship; and there, so far as human testimony goes, the _Investigator_ still is, in Mercy Bay. In imminent peril of starvation, M'Clure and his gallant crew were compelled to this abandonment; they sledged over the ice to Melville Island, where fortunately they met with another expedition, and safety was insured. This other expedition, the most remarkable of all for derelict, comes next for notice. Sir Edward Belcher, at a time when the public anxiety about the unknown fate of Franklin was most intense, was in 1852 placed in command of an expedition more complete than any that had been previously despatched to those regions. It comprised the _Resolute_ under Captain Kellett, the _Intrepid_ under Captain M'Clintock, the _Pioneer_ under Captain Sherard Osborn, the _Assistance_ under Belcher himself, and two or three auxiliary vessels. We have not here to tell how it arose that the ships made few or no discoveries, and disappointed the government in more ways than one. The sledgings, however, were splendid; and it was a joy to all that the expedition brought M'Clure and his crew safely back to their native land. Never were officers more deeply disappointed than when Belcher commanded them, one after another, to abandon their ships in 1854. He had been out two winters; some of the ships had been long ice-bound; and the sense he entertained of his responsibility impelled him to adopt a step which certainly could not have been adopted willingly. He ordered Kellett to abandon the immovable _Resolute_, M'Clintock the _Intrepid_, and Sherard Osborn the _Pioneer_; he himself abandoned the _Assistance_; and the officers and crews of all four ships obtained a passage to England in such other vessels as happened to be available in the autumn of 1854. Not only so, but they also brought with them M'Clure and the crew of the _Investigator_ (as denoted in the last paragraph). Out of these five abandoned ships four have never, so far as we are aware, been since seen by Europeans. They may perchance be iced up still, or have fallen to pieces by repeated shocks from masses of ice loosened during the brief summers. One at Mercy Bay in Banks Land, two on the shores of Melville Island, two in Wellington Channel--such were the localities of the derelicts. Perhaps some future explorers will tell us something of four of these brave old weather-beaten craft, of which, for more than twenty years, we have known nothing.