Having joined the Royal Navy at the age of ten, Frederick William Beechey (1796-1856) had risen to the rank of lieutenant when he served under John Franklin on the 1818 British expedition to the Arctic in search of a possible route from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Two ships, the Dorothea and the Trent, were sent to find a route via the seas around Spitsbergen. A little north of 80° their progress was halted by ice. Sailing west to Greenland, the Dorothea was seriously damaged and the expedition aborted. Beechey's account remains the principal source for this voyage as neither Franklin nor the overall commander David Buchan published their journals. Beechey's Arctic service equipped him to later command the Blossom in northern waters: his two-volume Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering's Strait (1831) is also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection.
