Friday morning, at seven o'clock, we rolled up our beds, or rather sleeping-bags, stowed the sledge, drank boiling hot chocolate, and gnawed cheerily at frozen pork and biscuit; the weather beautiful, calm, and very cold, below zero, we started, skirting round the bay. By noon a gale sprung up, sending a body of icy spiculae against our faces, causing both pain and annoyance. Two mock suns for the first time were seen to-day. At noon we sat down under the lee of our sledge, and partook of a mouthful of grog and biscuit, and again marched rapidly towards "Cape No Name!" By the evening we had marched fourteen miles, the entire circuit of the bay, without observing any trace of Franklin having visited the neighbourhood; and as frost-bites began to attack our faces, we erected our tent as expeditiously as possible, and in it took shelter from the wind and cold. The pungent smoke of the lignum vitae kept us weeping, as long as the cooking went on; and between the annoyance of it, the cold, and fatigue, we all dropped off to sleep, indifferent to a falling temperature, prowling bears, or a violent gale, which threatened to blow us from the beach on which we had pitched our fluttering tent. Next day, my work being done, we struck homeward for the squadron, and reached it the same evening, the said 12th of October being the last autumnal travelling of our squadron. The following week the temperature rallied a little, and the weather was generally finer; our preparations for wintering were nearly completed, and the poor sickly sun barely for two hours a day rose above the heights of Griffith's Island. To our great joy, on the 17th of October, Captain Penny came over from Assistance Harbour. He had happily decided on taking up the search of Wellington Channel; and an understanding was come to, that his squadron should carry out the travelling operations next spring on that route, whilst our squadron accomplished the farthest possible distance towards Melville Island, and from Cape Walker to the south-west. Captain P. expressed it as his opinion that the Americans had not escaped out of Barrow's Strait, in consequence of a sudden gale springing up from the southward, shortly after they had passed his winter quarters. This supposition we of course afterwards found to be true, although at the time we all used to speak of the Americans as being safe and snug in New York, instead of drifting about in the ice, within a few miles of us, as was really the case.