Admiral Sir Richard Collinson KCB (7 November 1811 – 13 September 1883) was an English naval officer and explorer of the Northwest Passage.

Collinson was in command of the Lady Bentinck, a vessel of 1800 tons burden and 520 horsepower, when it appeared with the Phlegethon off Chapoo in eastern China, causing a "sensation".

[1]: 303, 344 On 1 April 1842, the British Plenipotentiary of Trade Henry Pottinger reported that Collinson, as commander of the Nemesis based in Chusan, had contributed to a successful skirmish with Chinese troops on the island of Taisam near Ningbo in February of that year.

In 1850 Collinson was instructed to look for him in the Canadian Arctic by sailing eastward from the Bering Strait and Alaska, while Horatio Austin and others would use the normal route westward through the Parry Channel.

[citation needed] When Collinson reached the Bering Strait and learned that McClure was ahead of him he turned back and spent the winter in Hong Kong.

In the spring of 1852 he sent a sledge party north to Melville Island where they found tracks from an unknown traveller (these were McClure's men who were frozen in to the west.)

On 5 August he was freed from the ice and went along the south coast of Victoria Island into the Coronation Gulf, the easternmost point reached by a ship from the Bering Strait.