On the same day the Erebus and Terror sailed away north-west up the Waigat Strait. On the 26th they were sighted by the whaler The Prince of Wales, moored to an iceberg near the south entrance to Melville Bay, waiting for a favourable opportunity to round the middle ice and enter Lancaster Sound. The master of the whaler, Captain Dannett, was invited to dine with Sir John on the following day, but a favourable breeze sprang up, and the ships parted company. Captain Dannett was the last white man to set eyes on the ill-fated Erebus and Terror.
CHAPTER XIII
RAE AND THE BOOTHIA PENINSULA
In order to preserve the chronological order of events, it is now necessary to leave the Franklin expedition for a while, and to take up the thread of the exploration of Northern America where it was dropped by Dease and Simpson. It will be remembered that shortly before his untimely death Simpson had written a letter to the Governors of the Hudson’s Bay Company, suggesting that he should conduct an expedition along the undiscovered shores that lay between the Castor and Pollux River and Fury and Hecla Strait. Though he was destined never to know it, the plan was very favourably received by the directors, and their letter, conferring on him the sole command of the expedition, reached America very shortly after his death.
The immediate result of this sad event was that all plans for prosecuting the exploration of Northern America were held in abeyance for some years—till, indeed, 1845, when the news that England was fitting out a fresh expedition, with a view to discovering the North-West Passage, urged the Company on to further efforts. The command of the new expedition was offered by Sir George Simpson, who was still Governor-in-Chief of the Company’s territories, to Dr John Rae, then new to Arctic exploration, though he subsequently proved his worth, not only by the success which he achieved on the present journey, but also by the good work that he did in his search for Franklin.
The plan of campaign arranged by the Company differed materially from that originally propounded by Simpson. Simpson had proposed to travel eastward from the Castor and Pollux River and, after surveying Boothia Felix, to make his way, if possible, to Hudson’s Bay. Rae’s expedition, on the other hand, was to set out from Hudson’s Bay and to make its way up Rowe’s Welcome to Repulse Bay. There it was to cross the isthmus connecting the Melville Peninsula with the mainland, which, if the Eskimo stories were to be believed, was not more than three days’ journey, and, on reaching the sea on the other side, it was to push on till it had reached the point where either Ross or Dease and Simpson had left off. It must be remembered that at this time it was not known whether Boothia Felix was an island or a peninsula. If it proved to be the former, Rae was to make his way through the passage that divided it from the mainland and so into the Arctic Ocean. If the latter, he was to travel up its western shores until he reached some point that had been visited by the Rosses in the Victory.
The journey was likely to prove adventurous, for there was no degree of certainty that the party would be able to obtain sufficient provisions to keep them from starving. Rae was only to take two small boats with him, so that it would be impossible for him to equip himself with any great quantity of food, and he would be obliged to depend on such poor supplies as the barren country had to offer. As, therefore, it seemed more than probable that the party would have to face the unpleasing alternatives of being either starved or frozen to death, he had some difficulty at first in obtaining volunteers.
On June 1846, however, the preliminary difficulties having been overcome, Rae, with ten men, set out from York Factory. His boats, which were named the North Pole and the Magnet, were strong, clinker-built craft, 22 feet long by 7 feet 6 inches broad. In addition to the ordinary equipment, he carried an oiled canvas canoe and one of Halkett’s air-boats which had never been tried on one of these expeditions before, and proved eminently satisfactory.
The first part of the journey was necessarily slow, as in many cases the sea was still blocked with closely-packed ice, which needed careful negotiation. On July 24, however, the boats rounded Cape Hope and entered Repulse Bay, where the original exploration was to begin. On landing in Gibson Cove, they came upon a party of Eskimos, from whom they learnt the good news that the isthmus was not more than forty miles across, and that over a full thirty-five miles of this distance a chain of lakes afforded a waterway.
On the following morning the ladies of the tribe paid Rae a state visit. “They were all tattooed on the face,” he writes, “the form on each being nearly the same, viz. a number of curved lines drawn from between the eyebrows up over the forehead, two lines across the cheek from near the nose towards the ear, and a number of diverging curved lines from the lower lip towards the chin and lower jaw. Their hands and arms were much tattooed from the tip of the finger to the shoulder. Their hair was collected in two large bunches, one on each side of the head, and, a piece of stick about ten inches long and half an inch thick being placed among it, a strip of different-coloured deer-skin is wound round it in a spiral form, producing far from an unpleasing effect. They all had ivory combs of their own manufacture, and deer-skin clothes with the hair outwards; the only difference between their dresses and those of the men being that the coats of the former had much larger hoods (which are used for carrying children), in having a flap before as well as behind, and also in the greater capacity of their boots, which come high above the knee, and are kept up by being fastened to the girdle.” Curiously enough, one of these women had visited the Fury and Hecla twenty-three years before, and among her most prized possessions were some beads which Parry had given her.
With immense labour the boats were dragged up the stream which connects Repulse Bay with the chain of lakes, and the serious work of the expedition began. Rae found that he had not been misled by the stories of the Eskimos, and by August 1 he was on the shores of Committee Bay, the southernmost arm of Prince Regent Inlet. His first hope was that he would be able to sail round the bay and survey its shores. Ice and fog, however, rendered this quite impossible, so he decided, as there seemed to be no chance of the ice breaking up that season, to turn back to Repulse Bay and to hope for better luck in the following summer.