The increase in the number of the latter necessitated a division. The sick must remain till help comes, or go back to the ships. We can picture the fearful alternative. Many remained, and of that number two skeletons were afterwards found, and on board one of the ships the “bones of a large man with long teeth!” That is all!
The remainder pushed on to Cape Herschel, and left a record in a cairn. They were desperate and dying men, yet they endeavoured to reach the Great Fish River, but alas! alas! the skeleton found lying face downwards, left unburied as he fell, tells us as much of the fate of the whole party as if the record had been kept.
“The Polar clouds uplift
One moment, and no more.”
For a long time no one knew the fate of the Erebus and Terror, until Lady Franklin sent out McClintock in the Fox to lift the veil which hung over the last voyage of the intrepid John Franklin. But before giving the account of McClintock’s successful search we will enumerate the various attempts made by Government to ascertain the fate of Franklin. Our summary must be a very brief one.
Three years after Franklin had set out considerable uneasiness was felt in Great Britain concerning him. In 1848 two ships, the Herald and the Plover, were sent out by the Admiralty to afford assistance, but Sir John Richardson and Doctor Rae had anticipated the Government vessels, and gone via New York to the Mackenzie, which he had already twice visited with Franklin. Captain Sir James Ross also was searching by the Lancaster Sound, and he experienced many hardships; but in 1850 his vessels (the Enterprise and Investigator, under Collinson and McClure) were sent, and later on an international squadron was dispatched to Lancaster Sound under Captains Austin and Penny, Sir John Ross in the Felix, and Mr Grinnell’s two American ships under Lieutenant De Haven, as well as the Albert, sent out by Lady Franklin at her own cost, commanded by Commander Forsyth.
This mixture of royal and mercantile naval commands gave rise to some unfriendly feelings, but Captain Penny succeeded in finding many traces of Franklin’s crews, and the tombs of those who had died in 1846. Many most useful surveys and some geographical discoveries were made, but beyond the traces found by Ommaney and Penny nothing of the fate of the Franklin expedition was discovered.
In 1852 Sir E. Belcher sailed on the same errand. Lady Franklin also dispatched the Isabel. Doctor Rae in 1854, however, discovered, through the information afforded by the Esquimaux, that some white men had been seen in King William’s Land a few years previously, “dragging boats across the ice,” and “looking thin.” The Hudson’s Bay Company then sent Mr Anderson, in accordance with a request of the English Government, to explore the district; and on
Montreal Island he found the remains of a boat, and obtained from the Esquimaux many relics of Franklin’s expedition, with articles which had belonged to the crews. This intelligence decided Lady Franklin to make another attempt to learn the actual fate of her brave husband.
Before Doctor Rae had returned with the intelligence he had gained concerning the Franklin Expedition, a very important Arctic Expedition had been undertaken by Doctor Elisha Kane. To this we must turn our attention in a new chapter, as he went out to the limits of the Arctic Zone in search of Sir J. Franklin, and accomplished a most adventurous journey.