George francis lyon biography of rory hamilton

While not having a particularly distinguished career, he is remembered for the entertaining journals he kept and for the pencil drawings he completed in the Arctic; this information was useful to later expeditions. The expedition was underfunded, lacked support and because the ideas of John Barrow departed from Tripoli and thus had to cross the Sahara as part of their journey.

A year later, due to much officialdom they had only got as far as Murzuk where they both fell ill. Ritchie never recovered and died there, but Lyon survived and travelled a little further around the region. Exactly a year to the day he left, he arrived back in Tripoli, the expedition being a complete failure. Having been promised a promotion on his return, he now set about trying to pester the Admiralty into fulfilling their promise.

He irritated enough people that his reward was, in , to be given the command of HMS Hecla under William Edward Parry on his second attempt at the Northwest Passage. Among Lyon's lieutenants was Henry Parkyns Hoppner. The Inuit had told Parry that there was salt water three days' walk to the west, but this was apparently the Gulf of Boothia.

Hudson Bay was unusually ice-filled, and on 1 September , near Cape Fullerton , just west of the entrance to Roes Welcome Sound, a storm drove the ship onto a rock or iceberg. All hands expected the ship to sink but when the gale died down it was still afloat. On 12 September, Griper was forced to anchor offshore in a gale with heavy seas and snow.

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It lost its anchor cables and the masts and rigging were badly damaged. Lyon took three weeks to work the hulk out of Hudson Bay. Arriving at Spithead without anchors the ship only stopped when it fouled a three-decker's mooring cables. While he was well known in society, this last failure effectively saw him blacklisted in the Royal Navy and he never had another command.