If they were still alive when spring came, how they must have hoped each day for the freeing of the ships! As the days passed and spring grew to summer, summer to autumn, yet with no prospect of release from the cruel pack, the situation became hopeless and intolerable.
All this misery came upon them with greater force because success was so near. Franklin knew that a distance of but one hundred miles separated him from the object of his search. Almost within reach of the goal, here he was, locked in!
Though the ice did not break up, yet during the spring (May 24, 1847) Franklin sent a party under the command of Lieutenant Graham Gore to explore King William's Land. This party reached Cape Herschel, a point on the southern coast of King William's Land, and in the distance saw the continent of North America.
A navigable passage was known to exist along the northern coast of America from Boothia to Bering strait. Franklin himself and Richardson had discovered and surveyed the greater part of this extent of country.
Franklin had succeeded in reaching King William's Land by entering the Arctic from the Atlantic. Thus the discovery of the northwest passage was reduced to the finding of a link which should connect these two known waterways. This link was found by Graham Gore, when from Cape Herschel he saw the American coast across a narrow channel of water. So the credit of the discovery of the northwest passage must be given to Franklin. Had it not been for the fact that his ships were beset in the ice, Franklin would, without doubt, have sailed in 1846 from the Atlantic to the Pacific along the northern coast of North America.
As it was, Lieutenant Gore's discovery connected the
