Lake's naval record shows that the first ship he joined was HMS Argus – at that time stationed in Hong Kong - which he reached after four months sailing from England. Argus was a wooden hulled paddle-sloop, a fighting vessel with six cannon and a complement of 175 and, after sailing from Hong Kong with Lake on board, she spent most of her time in Japanese waters Eighteen months later in 1867, Lake transferred to HMS Manilla stationed in Shanghai. She remained in Chinese waters for a number of months before sailing east to Japan. (Manilla was originally a merchant vessel, a three-masted, steam powered schooner, bought by the Royal Navy in Shanghai in 1866, and purchased because the Navy required a small vessel that could be used for a variety of duties including acting as a store ship and carrying mail to ships.) In November 1868, HMS Manilla was assigned duties to help Richard Henry Brunton survey potential sites for the erection of lighthouses around Japan's coastline. Brunton, along with his assistant Arthur W Blundell and a party of Japanese officials, embarked at Yokohama and then sailed south with a list of fourteen sites to visit. The island of Sanuki Hiroshima was one of the sites on Brunton's list. They reached here on the morning of Sunday 20 December. Prayers were said and then the ‘Engineers Party’ disembarked to start their survey. Death At 2.5pm, the Ships Log records ‘Departed this life, Frank Toovey Lake, Navigating Midshipman.’ No explanation was written in the Log or Muster book as to the reason for his death. However, it is known Lake's death was sudden and unexpected as, in his memoirs Schoolmaster to an Empire published many years later, Brunton wrote, "Eventually we reached [Sanuki] Hiroshima. Here an incident occurred which is worth narrating, as showing another, but this time a most pleasing and praiseworthy phase of Japanese character. One of the midshipmen on the Manilla, a lad of nineteen, died quite suddenly while the vessel was at anchor." (However, in a death notice printed in The London and China Telegraph in March 1869, it says he died after a short illness. This indicates that perhaps his death was the result of cholera, a common and often sudden cause of death among sailors.) The next day, Lake was buried on Sanuki Hiroshima in the village of Enoura. The ship's log records, ‘9.30