Yet the sport these men were bent on was nothing less than a war of extermination against their fellow-countrymen. “They told us they were a party of 1,500 warriors, from 1,200 lodges, pitching their tents on towards Edmonton, leaving few behind capable of bearing arms. They were in pursuit of the Crees and Assiniboines, whom they threatened totally to annihilate, boasting that they themselves were as numerous as the grass on the plains.”
The artist “must be a great medicine-man,” the warriors thought, as they saw him drawing their portraits. [a]Franklin’s Fatal Voyage] As they were expecting a battle with the Crees next day, they got up a war dance, and with much solemnity placed him in the best position “to work his incantations” for their success—that is, to draw his pictures while they danced.
Turn your eyes now to the north. At the very time when the adventurous artist and his fur-trading friends were floating through the long-established “North-west boat passage” across the continent, the search for a north-west ship passage was ending in tragedy.
“We met here,” says the artist, arriving at the Pas on the 12th of June, 1848, “Sir John Richardson and Dr. Rae, en route to Mackenzie River, with two canoes, in search of Sir John Franklin,” the great Arctic explorer.
Three years before, on May 19, 1845, Franklin had left England in command of an expedition to discover what Columbus and so many other explorers had vainly sought, a sea-way to the east through the west. In his two ships, the Erebus and Terror, of the British navy, there sailed 129 officers and men. They were seen in July by a passing vessel in Baffin’s Bay, and then they vanished. Not one man ever came back.
One expedition after another was sent in search of them—by the British Government, by the Hudson’s Bay Company, by American friends, and by Lady Franklin herself when all others had given up the task as hopeless. In 1853, John Rae—a splendid specimen of the Hudson’s Bay factor, whom I knew in his later years—met a band of Eskimo who in the winter of 1850 had seen, first a large party of white men dragging southward a boat and sledges, and, some time after, dead bodies both on the mainland and on Montreal [a]Evidence of the Tragedy] Island, near the mouth of Back’s Fish River. From the Eskimo, Rae recovered a silver plate engraved with Franklin’s name, and many forks and spoons with the initials of his officers.
At last, but not until 1859, Lieutenant Hobson, an officer of Lady Franklin’s expedition under Captain McClintock’s command, found on King William Island three skeletons, two of them in a boat on a sleigh. In a stone cairn, too, he discovered the only written record of the tragedy, signed by Captain Crozier of the Terror. In a few sentences, scribbled on the edges of a printed form, this told that the ships had been beset by the ice since September 12, 1846; that Sir John Franklin had died on June 11, 1847; that on April 22, 1848, the ships had been abandoned; that twenty-four men, including nine officers, were dead; and that the remaining one hundred and five were starting for Back’s Fish River. It was too late. An old Eskimo woman was found who said that the strangers “fell down and died as they walked along.”
Though Franklin was lost, the object of his search was found. The relief expeditions added immensely to our knowledge of the north, and filled in the great blank Arctic map with a labyrinth of islands and straits. In 1850 one British ship, the Investigator, rounding Cape Horn and passing in through Behring Sea, sailed eastward for hundreds of miles along the north coast of Alaska and Rupert’s Land, before being frozen in. Captain McClure, with six men in a sledge, pressed on over the ice through Prince of Wales Strait between Banks Land and Prince Albert Land, for six days, till they came in sight of Melville Sound, which had already been entered from the east. [a]North-west Passage Found]
They had discovered, therefore, the existence of a North-west Passage; but when summer came, and the captain tried to bring his ship through the narrow strait, he was blocked by ice in mid-August, and had to spend a second winter frozen up. In April he was reached by a party from another ice-bound ship, the Resolute, which had come in from the Atlantic. Abandoning their own ship, McClure and his men went back with this party over the ice to the Resolute. That vessel also, and two others, had to be abandoned, after still another winter in the Arctic; and the crews were only rescued by fresh ships coming from England in 1854.