The ships left England on the 19th of May, 1845, and were last seen and spoken with on the 26th of July in Melville Bay on their way to Lancaster Sound. According to information gained during the long series of searches, they passed through the sound and went north for about a hundred and fifty miles, to 77°, up Wellington Channel into Penny Strait—the first time the passage had been made. Returning down the west side of Cornwallis Island, discovering the strait between it and Bathurst Island, they wintered at Beechey Island, where three of the men died and were buried; and where the most significant relic was about seven hundred tins of preserved meat that seemed to have been condemned as bad, just as the stock of similar stuff had in the same year been condemned and thrown overboard at Portsmouth. Leaving Beechey Island in 1846, they went south down Peel Sound, being the first to pass through it, and Franklin Strait—another new discovery—to within twelve miles of Cape Felix in King William Land, where, on the 12th of September, they were beset about half-way between Cape Adelaide in Boothia and Pelly Point in Victoria Land. Hereabouts the second winter was passed, and on the 24th of May a party under Lieutenant Gore crossed the ice to Point Victory, probably on a journey to examine the unknown coast between there and Cape Herschel. On the 11th of June, 1847, Sir John Franklin died. The ships drifted a short distance during their imprisonment in the ice, and the third winter was passed some twenty miles further south down Victoria Strait, where, on the 22nd of April, 1848, when fifteen miles north-north-west of Point Victory, they were abandoned, and the officers and crews, a hundred and five in all, under Crozier's command, started for Back's Great Fish River, some of them completing the first North-West Passage in crossing Simpson Strait and reaching Montreal Island. The first undoubted traces of the lost expedition were those discovered at Beechey Island, the news reaching England in the _Prince Albert_ in the autumn of 1850. As soon as the winter was over this excellent little schooner was again sent out by Lady Franklin under the command of Captain William Kennedy, who took with him as a volunteer Lieutenant Joseph René Bellot of the French navy, and also John Hepburn, who had been with Franklin on the land journey in 1819. Kennedy wintered at Batty Bay in North Somerset, and during a remarkable sledge journey, in which he made the circuit of the island, he and Bellot reached Brentford Bay, and, on the 21st of April, 1852, discovered the strait named after the gallant Frenchman. But he found no traces of the expedition through turning to the north and crossing to Prince of Wales Island, instead of going to the south at the western mouth of the strait. He had, however, discovered the termination of Boothia, the north point of the American continent which men had been seeking for three centuries.