On May 19th, 1845, he left England with the two ships Erebus and Terror, having on board 28 officers and 111 men—in all 134 souls—on a voyage to the Arctic Regions in the hope of discovering the North-West Passage. They reached Stromness, in the Orkneys, on July 1st, and were afterwards seen and spoken to in the North Sea by the whaler Prince of Wales, belonging to Hull. After that all was blank.
Lady Franklin did not expect to receive any early news from her husband, but when two years passed away without her hearing from him, she became anxious, and offered a large reward for any tidings of him. In 1848 old explorers went out to search for him, but without result. Still believing he was alive, she sent out other expeditions, and one was even dispatched from America. All England was roused, and the sympathy of the entire nation was extended to Lady Franklin.
Nine long years passed away, but still no news, until intelligence arrived that an Eskimo had been found wearing on his head a gold cap-band which he said he had picked up where "the dead white men were." Lady Franklin then made a final effort, and on July 1st, 1857, Captain McClintock sailed from England in the Fox. In course of time the matter was cleared up. It was proved that the whole of the expedition had perished, Sir John Franklin having died on June 11th, 1847. Many relics were found and brought back to England.
DOVE COTTAGE.
Lady Franklin, who died in 1875, was still alive at the time we passed through Grasmere. One of her last acts was to erect a marble monument to Sir John Franklin in Westminster Abbey, and it was her great wish to write the epitaph herself, but as she died before this was accomplished, it was written by Alfred Tennyson, a nephew of Sir John by marriage, and read as follows:
Not here! the white North hath thy bones, and thou
Heroic Sailor Soul!
Art passing on thy happier voyage now
Towards no earthly pole.