Despite being promoted as ideal for lake-fishing and duck-shooting, and being exhibited in the Great Exhibition of 1851, Halkett's boat designs were not commercially successful and never entered general use outside the specialised field of Canadian exploration. Later promoted to Captain, Halkett died on 23 March 1885, aged 65, and the manufacture of his boat designs was abandoned. John Rae gave his boat from the 1853 expedition to a Miss Peace of Kirkwall, and it lay forgotten on the rafters of a Kirkwall woodyard. It was identified and recovered many years later, and is now displayed in the Stromness Museum at Orkney. A second surviving example is held in the Hudson's Bay Company Museum Collection at the Manitoba Museum.