The explorer John Franklin, after returning to England, had married the poet Eleanor Anne Porden in 1823.

Their daughter, Eleanor Isabella, was born the following year.

His wife dies of tuberculosis in 1825, shortly after persuading her husband not to let her ill-health prevent him from setting off on another expedition to the Arctic.

This expedition, a two-year trip round trip down the Mackenzie River to explore the shores of the Beaufort Sea west of the river's mouth, is better supplied and more successful than his last.