which has been carefully fitted upon a sledge; in them the sick and disabled are tenderly packed; each man carries a great quantity of dothing — care is taken to have plenty of guns, powdefr, and shot, for they can drag at the utmost but forty days’ provision with them, and at the expiration of that time they hope to be in a country where their guns will feed them. Every trinket and piece of silver in the ships is carefully divided amongst the men; they hope to conciliate the natives with these baubles, or to procure food, and so far as fore-sight could afford the party every hope of safety, all has been done; but one fatal error occurred, — the question of weight to be dragged, with diminished physical power, has never been taken into consideration; or, if considered, no proper remedy applied.
On the 22nd of April, 1848, these gallant men fell into the drag-ropes of their sledges and boats; the colours were hoisted on their dear old ships, three hearty cheers were given for the stout craft that had borne them so nobly through many perils, and without a blush at deserting Her Majesty’s ships Erebus and Terror, Captains Crozier and Fitz- jamea lead the road to the nearest point of land, named Cape Victory.* Poor souls, they were three days traversing the intervening distance of fifteen miles, and the sad conviction was already pressing upon them, that they had over-estimated their physical strength and powers of endurance. Around the large cairn erected upon Point Victory the shivering diseased men cast away everything that could be spared; indeed perhaps much that, at that inclement season, they still needed to shield their half -starved frames from the biting blast. Pickaxes, shovels, rope, blocks, clothing, stores of all sorts, except provisions, sextants, quadrants, oars, and even a medicine-case, expressly fitted up for the journey, were here thrown away. Unrolling the record left here in the previous year by the good and gallant Gore, Captain Fitzjames proceeded to write round its margin those few, alas I too few; but graphic words, which tell us all we shall ever know of this last sad page in their touching history. The ink had to be thawed by fire, and benumbed must the hand have been that wrote those words; yet the writing is that of the same firm, self-reliant, light-hearted man who, three short years previously had been noted at Greenhithe as the life of the expedition.
In spite of frostbites and fatigue, the party presses on. They must keep marching southward towards the mainland where they hope to find deer and salmon, for upon their sledges they have only got forty days’ provision, and that store will be expended by the 7th of June, at latest,**
How are they to live after that? is a sad thought which flashes across the mind of many. They sigh, but will not impart their anxieties to each other. Seamen like, the light joke and merry laugh still flashes from mouth to mouth, and seems for the while to lighten the poor heart of its load of misery.
Poor lost ones! we mark them day by day, growing weaker under the fearful toil of dragging such ponderous sledges and boats, as well as their disabled comrades, through the deep snow, and over rugged ice; we hear the cheering appeal of the gallant officers to the despairing ones, the kind applause heartily bestowed to the self-sacrificing and the brave. Bodily endurance has its limits, devotion to one’s brother man its bounds, and half- way between Cape Victory where they landed, and Cape Herschel, it becomes apparent that if any are to be saved there must be a division of the party, and that the weak and disabled must stay behind, or return to the ships. One of the large boats is here turned with her bow north- ward, some stay here, the rest push on. Of those who thus remained, or tried to return, all we know is, that in long years afterwards, two skeletons were found in that boat, and that the wandering Esquimaux found on board one ship, the bones of another “large man with long teeth,” as they described him. On the fate of the rest of the sick and weak, and they must have formed a large proportion of the original party of 106 souls that landed on Cape Victory, we need not dwell.
The rest push on, they have tried to cheer their shipmates with the hope that they will yet return to save them — vain hope! Yet we see them with bending bodies, and with the sweat-drops freezing upon their pallid faces, straining every nerve to save sweet life — they pass from sight into the snow-storm, which the warm south wind kindly sends to shroud the worn-out ones, who gently lie down to die; and they died so peacefully, so calmly, with the mind sweetly wandering back to the homes and friends of their childhood; the long-remembered prayer upon their lips, and their last fleeting thoughts of some long-treasured love for one they would some day meet in Heaven. The cairn on Cape Herschel was reached, no one had been there since “Deare and Simpson” in 1839, except themselves. Here the last record was placed of their success and sad position, and then this forlorn hope of desperate men pushed on towards the Great Fish River; and, if we needed any proof of Franklin’s Expedition having been the “first to discover the North-west passage,” or of the utter extremity to which this retreating party was reduced, we need but point to the bleaching skeleton which lies a few miles south- ward of Cape Herschel; that silent witness has been accorded us, and he still lies as he fell, on his face, with his head towards his home. His comrades had neither turned, nor buried him. But why pursue the subject farther? why attempt to lift the veil with which the AH Merciful has been pleased to shut out from mortal ken, the last sad hour of brave men battling with famine and disease.
All we know farther of this “forlorn hope” is that Ur. Rae, from Esquimaux report, states that about
- So called by Captain Sir James Ross in his exploration of 1830. It -was the farthest point reached on King William’s Land by that indefatigable Arctic traveller.
- Franklin's expedition bad no pemican, the most portable
and nutritious of food; but even had they had some, it is well known by the experience of Arctic travellers that forty days is the maximum quantity of food, in addition to other weights, that the best equipped party could have dragged on their sledges, and as the Great Fish River was known not to open before August, it must have been dire necessity alone that induced Crosier and Fitxjamew to quit their shipe at so early a period of the year that neatly six weeks must have
intervened between the expenditure oi the provision upon their sledges and the disruption of the ice upon the Great Fish River.