it was his duty, under all the circumstances of the case, to return to England, where he arrived about the middle of October.
Captain Parry’s appointment to superintend the Hydrographical Office was confirmed by the Admiralty, Nov. 22, 1825; and as a further mark of their lordships’ approbation of his late proceedings. Captain Hoppner, Lieutenant Wynn, and Messrs. Brunton, Westropp, Crozier, and Richards, were soon afterwards promoted. On the 22nd Dec. in the same year, the freedom of Lynn was voted to him by the corporation of that borough, “in testimony of their high sense of his meritorious and enterprising conduct.”
In April, 1826, Captain Parry proposed to the first Lord of the Admiralty, to attempt to reach the North Pole, from the northern shores of Spitzbergen, by travelling with sledge-boats over the ice, or through any spaces of open water that might occur. His proposal was soon after referred to the President and Council of the Royal Society, who strongly recommended its adoption; and an expedition being accordingly determined upon for this purpose, he was again appointed to the Hecla, Nov. 11, in the same year. The officers selected to accompany him in that ship, were. Lieutenants James Clark Ross, Henry Foster (b), and Francis Rawdon Moira Crozier; Mr. James Halse, purser; Messrs. R. H. Foott, mate; Mr. Edward Joseph Bird, and ____ Beverly, midshipmen; and Mr. Robert M‘Cormick, assistant-surgeon.
The reports of several of our navigators who had visited Spitzbergen, and were well qualified to judge of the nature of the polar ice, concur in representing it as by no means unfavorable for this project. From one of the Seven Islands, and almost on the very spot from which Captain Parry subsequently took his departure in the boats, Lutwidge, the associate of Phipps in the expedition towards the North Pole, in 1773, describes the ice to the north-eastward, to the distance of 10 or 12 leagues, to have the appearance of “one continued plain of smooth unbroken ice, bounded only by the horizon.” In Captain Phipps’s chart of that voyage, the ice to the northward of the Seven Islands is represented as “flat and unbroken”;
