Elisha Kent Kane, son of Judge John K. Kane, was born in Philadelphia, February 3, 1820. In his youth he displayed those qualifications of ceaseless activity, daring adventure, and strong personal courage which characterized his mature manhood. Inclined to all efforts involving physical hardships and contact with nature, his early education was devoted to civil engineering and such natural sciences as chemistry, geography, geology, and mineralogy. Unfortunately, in his sixteenth year, chronic and functional heart disease developed, which intermittently affected him through life and deterred him from the profession of an engineer. Applying himself to medicine, he graduated therein in 1842 at the University of Pennsylvania, in the meantime having served as a resident physician of the Pennsylvania Hospital. His inaugural medical thesis, based on personal experiments and observations, gave him a reputation which augured professional prominence. In 1843 he was appointed physician to the United States embassy to China, under Caleb Cushing, who was charged with the negotiation of a treaty with that country. At the way ports and during the tedious intervals of the treaty negotiations, Kane lost no opportunity of travel and adventure. With Baron Löe he visited the Philippine Islands and the volcano of Tael. Not content with the usual point of view, and despite the protestations of the native guides, he was lowered two hundred feet in the crater, whence he scrambled downward to the smoking sulphur lake and dipped his specimen bottles into its steaming waters. In his ascent the loose, heated ashes charred his boots and gave way under his feet, the sulphur vapors nearly asphyxiated him, he fell repeatedly, and was barely able to tie the bamboo rope around him. Drawn up in an exhausted condition, and carried to a neighboring hermitage, he barely escaped violence at the hands of the offended natives, who considered his rash feat a sacrilege.
Resigning his appointment with the legation, Kane established himself as a physician at Whampoa, on the Canton River, where illness shortly broke up his professional practice. Fortunately for his future fame he was unsuccessful in his application to the Spanish Government for permission to practise medicine at Manilla, and Kane returned to the United States by the way of Singapore, India, Egypt, and Europe, his journey marked by adventure and danger. In these, as in all other sea voyages, he suffered excessively from sea-sickness, which required all of his indomitable will to endure with equanimity.
In 1846 he was commissioned assistant surgeon in the United States Navy; his first sea duty took him to the west coast of Africa, where coast fever invalided him within ten months. His desire for active service was so great that before his health was re-established he obtained orders from the Secretary of the Navy to proceed to head-quarters of the army, then in the City of Mexico, for duty in connection with the collection of data relative to field hospitals and surgical statistics. Here his activity and daring resulted in his being wounded in a guerilla skirmish.
Assigned temporarily to a surveying vessel, circumstances soon determined Kane's career and gave full scope to his enthusiastic energies, and insured his future fame. The appeals of Lady Franklin, the recommendations of President Taylor, and the generosity of Henry Grinnell, had culminated in the organization of a search expedition for Franklin in the Arctic regions. It was provided that the vessels should be manned by volunteers from the Navy, and among those offering their services for this mission of humanity none was more importunate than Kane. Persistent efforts brought him orders for this fateful voyage while bathing in the tepid waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and ten days later he sailed from New York for the icy wastes of the North as surgeon of De Haven's flag-ship, the Advance. This search, known in Arctic history as the First Grinnell Expedition, was made under a joint resolution of the Congress of the United States, dated May 2, 1850, "to accept and attach to the Navy two vessels offered by Henry Grinnell, Esq., to be sent to the Arctic seas in search of Sir John Franklin and his companions." Two very small sailing brigs constituted the fleet, the flag-ship Advance, commanded by De Haven, an officer of Antarctic experience under Wilkes, and the Rescue, under Master Griffin; the entire party numbered thirty-three officers and men.
Their objective point was Lancaster Sound and its westward extension, Barrow Strait, whence either or both Wellington Channel and Cape Walker were to be visited. The squadron passed safely through Davis Strait, and skirting the dreaded land-ice of Melville Bay, reached Cape York after three weeks of constant and dangerous struggle with the heavy ice, which nearly destroyed the Rescue, borne almost on her beam-ends by the enormous pressure from a moving ice-pack. De Haven fell in with the English squadrons on the same errand, August 19, 1850, and, entering Lancaster Sound with his British consorts, devoted his energies to the search in hand. Griffin, of the Rescue, shared with Captain Ommaney, R. N., the honors of the discovery, at Beechy island, of the wintering-place of Franklin's squadron in 1845-46. Later three graves of members of Franklin's party were found, and numerous evidences of the good condition and activity of the expedition during that winter. About three weeks later, on September 10, 1850, De Haven concluded that the position attained was not sufficiently advantageous to justify his wintering, and so decided to return to the United States. Unfortunately, strong gales and very cold weather prevented immediate action, and in a few days both brigs were frozen immovably in an enormous ice-pack, where they were destined to drift helplessly to and fro at the mercy of the winds and currents for many months.
Beset in Wellington Channel, to the north of Beechy Island, the American squadron first found itself drifting slowly, but with alarming steadiness, to the north, into waters and along coasts that had, as far as they then knew, never been visited. The drift carried the Advance to latitude 75° 25' north, longitude 91° 31' west, and on September 22d they discovered new land, to which De Haven gave the merited name of Grinnell. It proved to be an integral part of North Devon, of which it was the northwestern extension. Every few days there was a partial breaking up of the pack and consequent danger of destruction. On one occasion, says Kane: "We are lifted bodily eighteen inches out of water. The hummocks are reared up around the ship, so as to rise a couple of feet above our bulwarks, five feet above our deck. They are very often ten and twelve feet high, and threaten to overwhelm us. Add to this, darkness, snow, cold, and the absolute destitution of surrounding shores." The temperature fell below zero and the ships seemed destined to winter in Wellington Channel, but fortunately a strong northwest gale, in conjunction with heavy tides, disintegrated the main pack and set ships, ice and all, southward into Barrow Strait. Here they fell under the action of a southeasterly current and, drifting all winter, passed slowly through Lancaster Sound into Baffin Bay, where the opening polar summer found them yet fast in the ice, from which the two brigs were freed off Cape Walsingham, June 5, 1851, after drifting in eight and a half months a distance of ten hundred and fifty miles. It is impossible to adequately describe their physical discomforts and dangers, the mental depression of the sunless midwinter of eight weeks, and the even harder experiences of the Arctic spring-tide, when excessive cold and increasing lassitude made steady inroads on their impaired constitutions. Kane tells us they were continually harassed by uncertainties as to their ultimate fate. Yesterday the unbroken floe, stretching as far as the eye could reach, seemed so firm and stable as to insure months of quiet, uninterrupted life. Today, the groaning, uneasy pack, yielding to an unseen power, split and cracked in all directions, throwing up huge masses of solid ice, that threatened to destroy instantly the ship, and occasionally opened in wide cracks through which rushed the open sea. Indeed, the conditions were so critical and the ice-movements so rapid, that the entire party, within the brief space of twenty-four hours, had four times made ready to abandon their vessels.
In March the cold became intense, and for a week it averaged fifty-three degrees below the freezing-point. Scurvy assailed all but five of the crew, and De Haven was so ill that all his duties devolved on Griffin, who heroically bore up under disease and the mental and moral responsibilities that the situation forced on him. In all his efforts Griffin had no more effective coadjutor than the fleet-surgeon, Kane. Whether acting as a medical officer, treating skilfully the diseased crew; as a hunter, supplementing their scanty stock of anti-scorbutic food with the fresh meat of the seal; or as a man, devising means of amusement and stimulating them to mental and physical exertions, Kane incessantly displayed such qualities of cheerfulness, activity, and ingenuity as tended to dispel the pall of despair that sometimes enveloped the whole expedition.
When release from the ice permitted the voyage to be renewed, De Haven decided to refit in the Greenland ports and again return to Lancaster Sound; fortunately, as the squadron was not fitted for a second year's work, the ice in Melville Bay was such as to prevent immediate passage, and so they turned southward, reaching the United States on September 30, 1851.