The second to complete a north-west passage by linking up with Franklin's voyage was Dr. John Rae, an Orkneyman by birth, as energetic as Thomas Simpson and evidently not inferior to him in stamina, for in his Arctic journeys he walked a distance equal to that of the circumference of the earth. In 1846 he had surveyed the Committee Bay district between Boothia and the Melville Peninsula, reaching it from Repulse Bay, and in 1848 and 1849 he had been associated with Richardson in searching for Franklin along the coast from the Mackenzie eastwards. Next year, while in charge of the Mackenzie district, he was again requested to lead a Franklin search expedition, and, starting from Fort Confidence on the 25th of April, was on the sea by the 1st of May. Crossing over to Wollaston Land, and making westward along the coast on the 22nd of May, he rounded Cape Baring, just above the seventieth parallel. Crossing to its continuation, Victoria Land, on a second journey, he travelled eastward, and, going up Victoria Strait, rounded Pelly Point, also just above the seventieth parallel, on the 12th of July, thus practically completing the survey of the southern half of what Collinson was to prove is one large island. [Illustration: Yours very truly W Parry] Off Pelly Point, it afterwards appeared, the _Erebus_ and _Terror_ were beset in the ice in September, 1846, and fifty miles to the south-east they had been abandoned in April, 1848; but the only relic found by Rae on this occasion was the doubtful one—picked up in Parker Bay—of the butt-end of a flagstaff on which was nailed a piece of white line by two copper tacks, all three bearing the Government mark. This was the first to be found of anything that could be thought to be a trace of the missing ships, a sort of promise of what he was to meet with four years later; and it is worth noting that, had he not failed in getting across the strait to King William Land, Rae would in 1850 have probably discovered Franklin's fate. His farthest in these parts was passed in May, 1853, by Captain Richard Collinson, in his sledge journey to Gateshead Island from H.M.S. _Enterprise_, then wintering in Cambridge Bay. The _Enterprise_ and _Investigator_ had been placed under Collinson's command and sent by way of Cape Horn to search for Franklin from the west, the instructions being that the ships should not part company; but regardless of this, Commander Robert Le Mesurier M'Clure, of the _Investigator_, happening to get through Bering Strait first, declined to wait for his commanding officer, went off on an expedition on his own account and, by a sledge journey, joined Parry's track when in search of the North-West Passage.