Steering north-east from Franklin Bay, M'Clure reached the south of Parry's Banks Land and followed the coast north-eastwards, discovering Prince of Wales Strait and making his way rather more than half-way up, until, near Princess Royal Island in 72° 50´, he was caught in the ice and imprisoned for the winter. On Trafalgar Day, 1850, M'Clure left the _Investigator_ on a sledge journey up the strait, and at sunrise on the 26th of October, from Mount Observation in 73° 30´, a hill six hundred feet above the sea, he looked over Banks Strait and Melville Sound, and saw the coast of Banks Land terminating about twelve miles further on and thence trending to the north-west, while Wollaston Land, as it proved to be, turned eastward on the other side at Peel Point. That evening Banks Strait was reached at Cape Lord John Russell, and the North-West Passage by Prince of Wales Strait clearly demonstrated. The spot was not bare of vegetation, and there were many traces of animals, for, fortunately for M'Clure, there was no scarcity of game during his three winterings in Banks Land—reindeer in herds, musk oxen occasionally, hares in troops, ducks in plenty, ptarmigan almost as numerous, and bears, wolves, and foxes to feed on them; for instance, the weights of three items in the bag, 1945 lb. of musk ox, 7716 lb. of deer, and 1017 lb. of hare, show fairly good shooting. Enclosing a record of the visit in a cairn, M'Clure returned to the ship, from which in the spring three sledge parties were sent out—Cresswell's to the north-west finding that Banks Land was an island, Wynniatt's to the north-east reaching Reynolds Point on the north of Wollaston Land, and Haswell's down Wollaston Land to within forty miles of where Rae turned back about a week later—this being the only attempt at searching for Franklin that the expedition undertook after sighting Nelson Head. Released in July, the _Investigator_ retreated down the strait and attempted to circumnavigate Banks Land, finding to the west a coast as precipitous as a wall, the water deep—fifteen fathoms close in, with the yardarms almost touching the cliffs on one hand and the lofty ice on the other—and the pack drawing forty feet of water, rising in rolling hills a hundred feet from base to summit. On shore the hills were as remarkable. Many of them were peaked and isolated by precipitous gorges, about three hundred feet deep. And all the way up them were numbers of fallen trees, in many places in layers, some protruding twelve or fourteen feet, one of these trunks measuring nineteen inches in diameter. Says M'Clure: "I entered a ravine some miles inland, and found the north side of it, for a depth of forty feet from the surface, composed of one mass of wood similar to what I had before seen. The whole depth of the ravine was about two hundred feet. The ground around the wood or trees was formed of sand and shingle; some of the wood was petrified, the remainder very rotten and worthless even for burning."