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David Buchan (c. 1780 – after 8 December 1838) was a Scotland naval officer and Arctic explorer.
In 1813, Adonis and the sailing frigate escorted the Newfoundland fishing fleet back to Britain. The voyage was stormy and the vessels separated near the English Channel. Adonis regained the convoy but as they approached the Scilly Islands they encountered a French fleet. Adonis was too small meaningfully to defend the convoy and in fact only escaped by jettisoning all her guns.Howley and Howley (2000) p. 177.
The 1818 Spitzbergen expeditionAnthony Brandt,"The Man Who Ate His Boots', 2009, Chapter 1 was nearly the first the many Arctic expeditions that followed the Napoleonic Wars. It set out at the same time as that of John Ross into Baffin Bay. Both were prompted by the interest of John Barrow in Arctic exploration and the fact that in 1817 whalers reported that the normal ice between Greenland and Spitzbergen had disappeared.This was one year after the year without a summer
The ships were HMS Dorothea (Captain Buchan, first lieutenant Arthur Fleming Morrell, astronomer George Fisher) and HM brig Trent under John Franklin who was later famous for his disappearance in the Arctic. They left London on 4 April 1818 and reached Spitzbergen in June. They found that the ice had returned to normal. They entered Magdalena Bay on the west coast where they were frozen in for a few weeks. Escaping the bay they worked their way north through leads in the ice, often dragging the ships with ropes. By early July they were about 30 miles into the ice and could go no further. They were a little north of 80°, about the same latitude as northernmost Spitzbergen. No European had sailed this far north except William Scoresby. It took only nine days to return to open water, but almost immediately they were hit by a storm which threatened to drive them onto the ice. The storm died down but Dorothea was too damaged to continue in the Arctic. Franklin wanted to continue with Trent but Buchan overruled him. They reached home on 30 September.
Buchan returned to Newfoundland in 1819. Although he intended to return the Beothuk woman Demasduit to her people, she died of tuberculosis before he was able to make any additional contact with the Beothuk. Buchan later ordered additional efforts to return Demasduit's niece, Beothuk woman Shanawdithit, to her family but she refused to go with any European expedition. As far as she knew, all her people had died.
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