Meanwhile the expedition via Bering Sea had become separated in the Pacific, and M’Clure, in the Investigator, got so far ahead that he was able to pass through Bering Strait and work his way eastward north of British America, and through the narrow Prince of Wales Strait until he reached Princess Royal Islands, where he wintered. Here he was only thirty miles from Barrow Strait; and when he had climbed a high hill and saw its ice gleaming in the distance, he had in reality discovered the Northwest Passage. Yet he was not the first, as we now know, for when the survivors of Franklin’s ships, in their attempt to escape, had reached Cape Herschel, they, too, saw this same passage they had been sent to find, but then, as now, it was closed by perpetual ice, so that although we now know the way, we can no more avail ourselves of it than could they, except by going south of King William’s Land, through a strait of which they had not yet learned. The next summer was spent in a fruitless struggle to get north along the western side of Banks (or Baring) Land, in which he succeeded only far enough to get frozen in so firmly on the north shore of that great island that even the summer warmth did not release his ship. He would have perished had it not been that musk-oxen were plentiful; and by the spring of 1853, it was plain that the Investigator must be abandoned.
The Enterprise meanwhile had followed M’Clure in the spring of 1851, and passed two years in searching every shore and passage she could find, while her men made sledge-journeys far and near, as M’Clure’s men were doing, and once came within a few miles of Point Victory, where Franklin’s remains would have been found. At last, in the spring of 1854, she succeeded in making her way back along the American coast, and returned to England, completing one of the most remarkable of Arctic voyages.
During their absence the friends of Franklin had not been idle. The apparent sacrifice of this fine character aroused almost or quite as much interest in America as in England, and Yankee shipmasters knew the north as well as did the men of England and Scandinavia. Henry Grinnell, a prominent merchant in New York, furnished the money to fit out two ships, the Advance and Rescue, commanded by Lieutenants De Haven and Griffiths, of the United States navy. They assisted in the search about Beechey Island, then struck north and discovered Grinnell Land, after which they returned before the winter had closed in. With them was a young physician and traveler, Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, who persuaded Mr. Grinnell to send him again to the north, less to search for Franklin, whom he had despaired of, than to prosecute explorations in higher latitudes. In 1853, in command of the little brig Advance, manned principally by whaling men, he left New London, Conn., and made his way straight up to the head of Baffin’s Bay, which narrows northward into Smith Sound, where, on the eastern, or Greenland, shore of its expansion, since called Kane Basin, he was stopped by ice and remained a prisoner until rescued in 1855.
Dr. Kane wrote the histories of these expeditions, and especially of the latter one, in books so charmingly expressed, and abounding in such novel information, that they were read like romances in every home in the land, and did more to fire the ardor for Arctic discovery which has ever since glowed in this country, than anything else that had been said or done. The most immediate result was that Dr. I. I. Hayes, who had been with Kane, took a ship to Smith Sound and spent the winter of 1860-61 there, but with little result. More came from the expeditions led by an enthusiastic journalist of Cincinnati, Charles F. Hall, but before speaking of these, let us return to the English search for Franklin.
Undeterred by the failure of Austin and Penny, or the silence of Collinson and M’Clure, the British government in 1852 despatched again the four vessels used by Austin, and added a fifth, the Assistance, and a store-ship, the North Star, to form a depôt of supplies at Beechey Island. The old haphazard ways had given place to very systematic methods of advance and rescue; but steam was little employed as yet, because of the trouble and cost of supplying coal, although two small steam vessels, as tenders, accompanied this, the largest and most bountifully equipped expedition that had yet started out. The fleet, under command of Sir Edward Belcher, proceeded through Lancaster Sound, beyond which they scattered somewhat, and spent the first winter in extensive sledge-journeys, during which they discovered (by a message that M’Clure had left on Melville Island) where the Investigator was imprisoned, and rescued all its people in June, 1853.
This great expedition learned nothing of Franklin, although it did learn much of other Arctic matters, and left the map substantially complete south and west of Jones Sound; but its honors rested upon M’Clure, who, first of all recorded men, had really made the Northwest Passage by sailing and sledging around the northern end of America. The settlement of this long-discussed matter had proved it of no practical value; but the British Parliament kept its word, and gave £10,000 (half of the promised reward) to the officers and crew of the Investigator, besides raising M’Clure to knighthood. An incident of this expedition is the fact that Kellett’s abandoned ship Resolute survived crushing long enough to drift out through Barrow Strait and Lancaster Sound and down into Davis Strait, where in September, 1855, she was found and towed home by an American whaler. As she was little injured, she was presented to the British government with the compliments of the United States, and a few years later, when she came to be broken up, a fine table was made from her oaken timbers, and returned as a present to Uncle Sam; and it now stands in the private office of the President of the United States in the Executive Mansion at Washington.
Two great facts had now been ascertained. One was that none of Franklin’s men or ships survived. The other fact was, that although there was plenty of water north of the American continent, it was so obstructed by permanent ice that probably no vessel could ever make its way through from the Atlantic to the Pacific; none has done so yet, despite the determined effort of the steam yacht Pandora in 1875, but ships from the east have reached points also reached by ships from the west. The everlasting ice sheet of the polar ocean, ever crowding down upon this northern coast and into the channels between the islands north of it, forms a barrier that will very rarely, if ever, pause or open long enough to let a vessel through, even south of King William and Victoria lands. The outflowing warm waters of the rivers or other influences may sometimes produce a narrow space comparatively free from ice in summer along the shore of the continent and greater islands; but everywhere off shore, and never at a great distance, begins a thick mass of perpetual ice, which, it is believed, extends across the pole like a cap, and reaches on the other side nearly to Petermannland. To this has been given the name of the Paleocrystic Sea, or sea of ancient ice, and nothing is known of it beyond the blue cliffs of its margin that confronts the explorer as he gazes abroad from the hills of the Parry Islands or Banks Land, or vainly seeks in some lone vessel north of Alaska or Siberia to penetrate its glassy front.
So thoroughly were the islands of this archipelago explored, and so unpromising seems further study, that Arctic voyagers have long ceased to risk their ships there, and the story of Franklin’s fate was finally learned by land travelers. As early as 1854 Dr. Rae and a party of Hudson’s Bay Company’s men had traveled over land and ice to King William’s Land, proved it an island, and heard stories of the death by famine and cold of white men who could be no other than the Franklin crew, as was further shown by various relics which Dr. Rae obtained from the Eskimos. Dr. Rae claimed and received £10,000 of the reward offered by the British government. The next year another party, going down the Great Fish River, recovered many other articles from Eskimos at the mouth of the river and on Montreal Island. It was evident even then that every one had perished in an attempt, nearly successful, to reach the mainland at the mouth of this river. Lady Franklin, however, despatched an expedition in the Fox, under the command of the experienced M’Clintock, which at last brought back, not her husband, but the satisfaction of knowing fully his fate.
All along the west and south coast remains of articles belonging to the ships were found, and skeletons—two of them in a broken boat; and finally in a stone cairn a written record that briefly told the tale of disaster.