He was born in Chichester,[2] the elder son of Lieutenant Colonel George Lyon of the 11th Light Dragoons and Louisa Alexandrina Hart.

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.

[clarification needed] 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.

[4] Hudson Bay was unusually ice-filled, and on 1 September 1824, near Cape Fullerton, just west of the entrance to Roes Welcome Sound, a storm drove the ship onto a rock or iceberg.

[5] He died on 8 October 1832, on board the packet boat Emulous en route from Buenos Aires to Britain to be treated for eye problems.

Wearing a thawb and learning fluent Arabic, he managed to blend in with the inhabitants of North Africa; he was tattooed by the Inuit in the Arctic, using needle and sooty thread, and ate raw caribou and seal meat with them.

But the information recorded about the Inuit tribes that he met proved valuable to later generations of anthropologists, such as Franz Boas and Knud Rasmussen, who relied on his journals as a reference point for their own observations.