The accident which had now befallen the _Fury_, and which, when its fatal result was finally ascertained, at once put an end to every prospect of success in the main object of this voyage, is not an event which will excite surprise in the minds of those who are either personally acquainted with the true nature of this precarious navigation, or have had patience to follow me through the tedious and monotonous detail of our operations during seven successive summers. To any persons thus qualified to judge it will be plain that an occurrence of this nature was at all times rather to be expected than otherwise, and that the only real cause for wonder has been our long exemption from such a catastrophe. I can confidently affirm, and I trust that on such an occasion I may be permitted to make the remark, that the mere safety of the ships has never been more than a secondary object in the conduct of the expeditions under my command. To push forward while there was any open water to enable us to do so has uniformly been our first endeavour; it has not been until the channel has actually terminated that we have ever been accustomed to look for a place of shelter, to which the ships were then conducted with all possible despatch; and I may safely venture to predict that no ship acting otherwise will ever accomplish the Northwest Passage. On numerous occasions, which will easily recur to the memory of those I have had the honour to command, the ships might easily have been placed among the ice and left to drift with it in comparative, if not absolute, security, when the holding them on has been preferred, though attended with hourly and imminent peril. This was precisely the case on the present occasion; the ships might certainly have been pushed into the ice a day or two, or even a week beforehand, and thus preserved from all risk of being forced on shore; but where they would have been drifted, and when they would have been again disengaged from the ice, or at liberty to take advantage of the occasional openings in-shore (by which alone the navigation of these seas is to be performed with any degree of certainty), I believe it impossible for any one to form the most distant idea. Such, then, being the necessity for constant and unavoidable risk, it cannot reasonably excite surprise that on a single occasion out of so many in which the same accident seemed, as it were, impending, it should actually have taken place.