On returning to the “Resolute,” Lieutenant Mecham found all hands busy preparing to leave the ship, Sir E. Belcher having given orders to abandon her, as well as the “Assistance,” “Pioneer,” and “Intrepid,” which had now been blocked up above a year in the ice, and had no chance of escaping.
Thus the summer of 1854 witnessed the return to England of the “North Star,” with all those brave crews which had spent so many unavailing efforts, and in numerous boat and sledge excursions had explored so many known and unknown coasts in search of Franklin; and thus also M’Clure and his comrades, abandoning the “Investigator” in Mercy Bay, returned home through Davis’s Straits, after having entered the Polar Ocean at the Strait of Bering. He had, however, been preceded by Lieutenant Cresswell and Mr. Wynniat, who, on an excursion to Beechey Island in the summer of 1858, had there met with and joined the “Phœnix,” Captain Inglefield, who, accompanied by his friend Lieutenant Bellot, had conveyed provisions to Sir E. Belcher’s squadron, and was about to return to England. During this expedition Bellot, whose many excellent qualities had made him a universal favorite, was unfortunately drowned by a fall into an ice-crevice during a sledge excursion. A stone monument erected before Greenwich Hospital reminds England of the gallant volunteer whose name is gloriously linked with that of Franklin in Arctic history.
Years had thus passed without bringing any tidings of the “Erebus” and “Terror” since the discovery of their first winter-quarters, until at last, in the spring of 1854, Dr. Rae, of the Hudson’s Bay Company, while engaged in the survey of the Boothian isthmus, fell in with a party of Esquimaux, who informed him that in the spring of 1850 some of their countrymen on King William’s Island had seen a party of white men making their way to the mainland. None of them could speak the Esquimaux language intelligibly, but by signs they gave them to understand that their ships had been crushed by ice, and that they were now going to where they expected to find deer to shoot. At a later date of the same season, but before the breaking up of the ice, the bodies of some thirty men were discovered on the continent a day’s journey from Back’s Great Fish River, and five on an island near it. Some of the bodies had been buried (probably those of the first victims of famine), some were in a tent, others under the boat which had been turned over to form a shelter, and several lay scattered about in different directions. Of those found on the island, one was supposed to have been an officer, as he had a telescope strapped over his shoulder, and his double-barrelled gun lay underneath him. The mutilated condition of several of the corpses and the contents of the kettles left no doubt that our wretched countrymen had been driven to the last resource of cannibalism, as a means of prolonging existence. Some silver spoons and forks, a round silver plate, engraved “Sir John Franklin, K.C.B.,” a star or order, with the motto, “Nec aspera terrent,” which Dr. Rae purchased of the Esquimaux, corroborated the truth of their narrative.
Thus it was now known how part of the unfortunate mariners had perished, but the fate of the expedition was still enveloped in mystery. What had become of the ships and of the greater part of their crews? And was Franklin one of the party seen by the Esquimaux, or had an earlier death shortened his sufferings?
To solve at least this mournful secret—for every hope that he might still be alive had long since vanished—his noble widow resolved to spend all her available means—since Government would no longer prosecute the search—and with the assistance of her friends, but mostly at her own expense, fitted out a small screw steamer, the “Fox,” which the gallant M’Clintock, already distinguished in perilous Polar voyages, volunteered to command. Another Arctic officer, Lieutenant Hobson, likewise came forward to serve without pay.
At first it seemed as if all the elements had conspired against the success of this work of piety, for in the summer of 1857 the floating ice off Melville Bay, on the coast of Greenland, seized the “Fox,” and after a dreary winter, various narrow escapes, and eight months of imprisonment, carried her back nearly 1200 geographical miles, even to 63½° N. lat. in the Atlantic.
At length, on April 25, 1858, the “Fox” got free, and, having availed herself of the scanty stores and provisions which the small Danish settlement of Holstenburg afforded, sailed into Barrow Strait. Finding Franklin Channel obstructed with ice, she then turned back, and steaming up Prince Regent’s Inlet, arrived at the eastern opening of Bellot’s Strait. Here the passage to the west was again found blocked with ice, and after five ineffectual attempts to pass, the “Fox” at length took up her winter-quarters in Port Kennedy, on the northern side of the strait.
On his first sledge excursion in the following spring, M’Clintock met at Cape Victoria, on the south-west coast of Boothia, with a party of Esquimaux, who informed him that some years back a large ship had been crushed by the ice out in the sea to the west of King William’s Island, but that all the people landed safely.
Meeting with the same Esquimaux on April 20, he learned, after much anxious inquiry, that besides the ship which had been seen to sink in deep water, a second one had been forced on shore by the ice, where they supposed it still remained, but much broken. They added that it was in the fall of the year—that is, August or September—when the ships were destroyed; that all the white people went away to the Great Fish River, taking a boat or boats with them, and that in the following winter their bones were found there.
These first indications of the fate of Franklin’s expedition were soon followed by others. On May 7 M’Clintock heard from an old Esquimaux woman on King William’s Island that many of the white men dropped by the way as they went to the Great River; that some were buried, and some were not. They did not themselves witness this, but discovered their bodies during the winter following.