The voyage was a private venture, undertaken for the purpose (not made generally known at the time) of reaching King William Island and making a thorough search for relics of the ‘Erebus’ and ‘Terror’ abandoned there in 1848. It was unsuccessful, as the ‘Pandora’ was forced by ice in Peel Sound to turn back. Accounts of the voyage were published by F G Innes-Lillingston in ‘The land of the white bear’ (London, 1876), by J A MacGahan in ‘Under the northern lights’ (London 1876) (particularly pages 325-329), and by Sir Clements Markham in ‘The threshold of the unknown region’, 4th edition (London, 1876), Appendix C (pages 434-438).

Most of the paragraphs have been subsequently written through with a single word of description together with a single (sometimes a double) line, presumably by Arthur Horner, with a view to publication. He is known to have been the author of 'Notes on Arctic natural history' (1875), but it is not known where it was published, or whether it was based upon the contents of this journal. Some of the leaves are mutilated, portions having been cut out for an unidentified purpose.