384 ONCE A WEEK. [November 5, 1859.
and fuel for cooking. Upon this estimate it was
found that, for a hundred days’ journey, they
could march ten miles per diem, and endure
a temperature with impunity of fifty or sixty
degrees below the freezing-point of water. These
facts we offer for the information of military
authorities; and they should remember, that
our men dragged their tents with them, and
that the country traversed was one vast desert,
affording only water, though that had to be
thawed from snow, out of the daily modicum of
fueL
All this labour, however — all this generous expenditure of the legislature of England on behalf of her people, who entered deeply and earnestly into the sad question, What has become of Franklin? — brought back no information of his fate: and still further to test the perseverance which forms the best trait of our national cha- racter, the fall of 1854 witnessed the abandonment in icy seas of a noble expedition of four ships. It was indeed a catastrophe, though neither an officer nor a man was lost. The “I told you so ” rang through the land of those who had long since got rid of the question by tumbling ice-bergs over on top of the Erebus and Terror; and those who felt convinced that the mystery would yet be unravelled, sighed, and knew not where to look for support. The skill and hardihood of the officers — the devotion and zeal of our sailors, and the accomplishment of the north-west passage by Captain Sir Robert M'Clure — were accepted by the public as some consolation for the wounded maritime pride of Britain in the inconclusive allied war with Russia, though it was decided that no further search should be made on the part of the Government.
Hardly had men declared the solution of the fate of the lost expedition a hopeless task, when in October, 1854, from the shores of Prince Regent’s Inlet, appeared a traveller, Dr. Rae, bringing the conclusive information, which we men- tioned in the end of our last number, of the starvation of a forlorn hope of forty men and officers from the Erebus and Terror, at the mouth of the Great Fish River. The Esquimaux from whom he obtained his intelligence, told him that the two ships had been beset, or wrecked, off the coast of King William’s Land.
The lost expedition was thus reported to be in the centre of the square of unsearched ground, be- fore alluded to. It would have been far more easily accessible to our various expeditions, whe- ther by way of Barrow, or Behring’s Strait, than many of the more remote regions explored by them; but, by a strange fatality, all our travellers turned back short of the goal, because they found no cairn, no trace, no record to induce them to push on towards it. However, that there the lost ships were, no one who knew anything of the matter could then doubt; and of course the natural conclusion under such circumstances was, that some one of the Arctic ships in our dockyards would have been immediately sent to close the search in a satisfactory manner, even though all hope of saving life might be at an end. The Admiralty and Government thought otherwise; all publio endeavours ceased; and, as is too often the case in Britain, private enterprise was left to crown the column which the devotion of a public profession had served to erect. At this juncture, the widow of Franklin stepped forth to carry out what the admirals in Whitehall and statesmen in Downing Street declared to be an impossibility. This energetic, self-reliant woman, seconded by a few staunch friends, pre-eminent amongst whom stood Sir Roderick Murchison, proceeded for the third time to try to carry out by private means what ignorance, rather than ill-will, prevented the Admiralty from executing, for, after the death of Barrow, and Beaufort, and the retirement of Ad- miral Hamilton, the only person left at the Board who understood the question was Admiral Sir Alexander Milne, and he stood alone in voting for a final Government expedition. Lady Franklin’s plan was to send a single vessel down from Prince Regent’s Inlet, or Cape Walker, towards King Wil- liam’s Land. Twice already had she been foiled in this identical scheme; though on the last occasion the discovery of Bellot’s Strait, leading direct to King William’s Land, paved the way for her final effort.
An appeal to the public for pecuniary aid met with but partial success, and Lady Franklin had to sacrifice all her available property and live humbly in lodgings to enable her to meet the neces- sary expenses attendant on the purchase of a fine screw schooner yacht, the Fox, and her equipment for arctic service. Many able officers of the naval and mercantile marine came generously forward and volunteered their gratuitous services. Amongst the first was Captain George H. Richards; but hardly had his offer been accepted, when the Admiralty appointed him to the Plumper for a survey of Vancouver’s Land. His place was almost immediately filled by Captain Leopold M‘Clintock, whose high reputation during years of continuous service in those frozen seas rendered his acquisition an omen of perfect success.
Various circumstances combined to retard the departure of the gallant little Fox, and it was not until July, 1857, that she and her noble com- pany put forth from Aberdeen. Round Captain M‘Clintock stood twenty-five gallant men, including three officers and an interpreter. Allen Young, a generous captain of whom the merchant service have good reason to be proud, went as sailing- master, and not only gave his services gratuitously, but threw 500Z. into the general fund for expenses. Lieutenant Hobson, of the Navy, served as chief officer, and Dr. Walker of Belfast, a young and rising medical man, went also to seek honour where so many of his gallant countrymen had already won it. Petersen, the Dane, who had spent half his life within the arctic zone, quitted Copenhagen at an hour’s notice to aid Captain M ‘Clintock as Esquimaux interpreter; and amongst the men were many gallant fellows who had for years laboured under Her Majesty’s pendant in the frozen north.
The Fox before long reached the edge of that vast belt of broken-up ice which all the summer stretches across the upper portion of Baffin’s Bay, and is known under the general term of middle-ice. M ‘Clintock was late, the season unfavourable, his
vessel a small one, yet he fought a gallant fight to