In the reign of Henry VIII., Dr. Robert Thorne declared that “if he had facultie to his will, the first thing he would understande, even to attempt, would be if our seas northwarde be navigable to the Pole or no.” And it is said that the king, at his instigation, “sent two fair ships, well-manned and victualled, having in them divers cunning men, to seek strange regions; and so they set forth out of the Thames, the 20th day of May, in the nineteenth year of his reign, which was the year of our Lord 1527.” Of the details of this expedition, however, we have no record, except that one of the vessels was wrecked on the coast of Newfoundland.

In 1536, a second Arctic voyage was undertaken by a London gentleman, named Hore, accompanied by thirty members of the Inns of Law, and about the same number of adventurers of a lower estate. They reached Newfoundland, which, according to some authorities, was discovered by Sebastian Cabot in 1496, and here they suffered terrible distress; in the extremity of their need being reduced to cannibalism. After the deaths of a great portion of the crew, the survivors captured by surprise a French vessel which had arrived on the coast, and navigated her in safety to England.

But the true history of Arctic Discovery dates, as Mr. Markham observes, from the day when the veteran navigator, Sebastian Cabot, explained to young Edward VI. the phenomena of the variation of the needle. On the same day the aged sailor received a pension; and immediately afterwards three discovery-ships were fitted out by the Muscovy Company under his direction. Sir Hugh Willoughby was appointed to their command, with Richard Chancellor in the Edward Bonadventure as his second. The latter, soon after quitting England, was separated from the squadron, and sailing in a northerly direction, gained at last a spacious harbour on the Muscovy coast. Sir Hugh’s ship, and her companion, the Bona Confidentia, were cast away on a desolate part of the Lapland coast, at the mouth of the river Arzina. They entered the river on September 18, 1563, and remained there for a week; and “seeing the year far spent, and also very evil weather, as frost, snow, and hail, as though it had been the deep of winter, they thought it best to winter there.” But as day followed day, and week followed week, in those grim solitudes of ice and snow, the brave adventurers perished one by one; and many months afterwards their bleached bones were discovered by some Russian fishermen.

In the spring of 1556, Stephen Burrough, afterwards chief pilot of England, fitted out the “Search-thrift” pinnace, and sailed away for the remote north. He discovered the strait leading into the sea of Kara, between Novaia Zemlaia and the island Waigatz; but he made up his mind to return, because, first, of the north winds, which blew continually; second, “the great and terrible abundance of ice which we saw with our eyes;” and third, because the nights waxed dark. He arrived at Archangel on September 11, wintered there, and returned to England in the following year.

Twenty years later, on a bright May morning, Queen Elizabeth waved a farewell to Martin Frobisher and his gallant company, as they dropped down the Thames in two small barks, the Gabriel and the Michael, each of thirty tons, together with a pinnace of ten tons. They gained the shores of Friesland on the 11th of July; and sailing to the south-west, reached Labrador. Then, striking northward, they discovered “a great gut, bay, or passage,” which they named Frobisher Strait (lat. 63° 8’ N.), and fell into the error of supposing that it connected the Atlantic Ocean with the Pacific. Here they came into contact with some Eskimos; and Frobisher describes them as “strange infidels, whose like was never seen, read, nor heard of before: with long black hair, broad faces and flat noses, and tawny in colour, wearing seal-skins, the women marked in the face with blue streaks down the cheeks, and round about the eyes.”

Frobisher’s discoveries produced so great an impression on the public mind, that in the following year he was placed at the head of a larger expedition, in the hope that he would throw open to English enterprise the wealth of “far Cathay.” About the end of May 1577, he sailed from Gravesend with the Ayde of one hundred tons, the Gabriel of thirty, and the Michael of thirty, carrying crews of ninety men in all, besides about thirty merchants, miners, refiners, and artisans. He returned in September with two hundred tons of what was supposed to be gold ore, and met with a warm reception. It was considered almost certain that he had fallen in with some portion of the Indian coast, and Queen Elizabeth, naming it Meta Incognita, resolved to establish there a colony. For this purpose, Frobisher was dispatched with fifteen well-equipped ships, three of which were to remain for a twelvemonth at the new settlement, while the others, taking on board a cargo of the precious ore, were to return to England.

In the third week of June Frobisher arrived at Friesland, of which he took possession in the queen’s name. Steering for Frobisher Strait, he found its entrance blocked up with colossal icebergs; and the bark Dennis, which carried the wooden houses and stores for the colony, coming in collision with one of these, unfortunately sank. Then, in a great storm, the fleet was scattered far and wide,—some of the vessels drifting out to sea, some being driven into the strait; and when most of them rejoined their admiral, it was found they had suffered so severely that no help remained but to abandon the project of a colony. They collected fresh supplies of ore, however, and then made their way back to England as best they could. Here they were met with the unwelcome intelligence that the supposed gold ore contained no gold at all, and was, in truth, mere dross and refuse.

The dream of a northern passage to Cathay was not to be dissipated, however, by an occasional misadventure. Even a man of the keen intellect of Sir Humphrey Gilbert felt persuaded that through the northern seas lay the shortest route to the treasures of the East; and having obtained from Queen Elizabeth a patent authorizing him to undertake north-western discoveries, and to acquire possession of any lands not inhabited or colonized by Christian princes or their subjects, he equipped, in 1583, with the help of his friends, a squadron of five small ships, and sailed from England full of bright visions and sanguine anticipations. On board his fleet were smiths, and carpenters, and shipwrights, and masons, and refiners, and “mineral men;” not to speak of one Stephen Parmenio, a learned Hungarian, who was bound to chronicle in sonorous Latin all “gests and things worthy of remembrance.”

Sir Humphrey formed a settlement at Newfoundland; and then, embarking on board the Squirrel, a little pinnace of ten tons burden, and taking with him the Golden Hind and the Delight, he proceeded on a voyage of exploration. Unhappily, the Delight ran ashore on the shoals near Sable Land, and all her crew except twelve men, and all her stores, were lost. The disaster determined Sir Humphrey to return to England; and his companions implored him to embark on board the Golden Hind, representing that the Squirrel was unfit for so long a voyage. “I will not forsake,” replied the chivalrous adventurer, “the brave and free companions with whom I have undergone so many storms and perils.” Soon after passing the Azores, they were overtaken by a terrible tempest, in which the tiny pinnace was tossed about by the waves like a straw. The Golden Hind kept as near her as the rolling billows permitted; and her captain has left on record that he could see Sir Humphrey sitting calmly in the stern reading a book. He was heard to exclaim—“Courage, my lads; we are as near heaven by sea as by land!” Then night came on, with its shadows and its silence, and next morning it was perceived that the pinnace and her gallant freight had gone to swell the sum of the irrecoverable treasures of the deep.

But neither Frobisher’s mishap nor Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s melancholy fate could check that current of English enterprise which had set in for the North. There was an irresistible attraction in these remote northern seas and distant mist-shrouded lands, with all their possibilities of wealth and glory; and Arctic Discovery had already begun to exercise on the mind of the English people that singular fascination which the course of centuries has not weakened, which endures even to the present day. So, in 1585, Sir Adrian Gilbert and some other gentlemen of Devonshire raised funds sufficient to fit out a couple of vessels—the Sunshine of fifty, and the Moonshine of thirty-five tons—for the great work of discovery; and they gave the command to a veteran mariner and capable navigator, Captain John Davis, a countryman, or county-man, of their own. Towards the end of July he reached the west coast of Greenland, and its cheerless aspect induced him to christen it the “Land of Desolation.” His intercourse with the Eskimos, however, was of the friendliest character. Standing away to the north-west, he discovered and crossed the strait which still bears his name; and to the headland on its western coast he gave the name of Cape Walsingham. Having thus opened up, though unwittingly, the great highway to the Polar Sea, he sailed for England, where he arrived on the 20th of September.

In his second voyage, in 1586, when, in addition to the Sunshine and the Moonshine, he had with him the Mermaid of one hundred and twenty tons, and the North Star pinnace of ten, he retraced his route of the previous year. The Sunshine and the North Star, however, he employed in cruising along the east coast of Greenland; and they ascended, it is said, as high as lat. 80° N.

Davis in his third voyage pushed further to the north, reaching as far as the bold promontory which he named Cape Sanderson. He also crossed the great channel afterwards known as Hudson Bay.

The next Englishman who ventured into the frozen seas was one Captain Waymouth, in 1602; but he added nothing to the scanty information already acquired. An Englishman, James Hall, was the chief pilot of an expedition fitted out in 1605 by the King of Denmark, which explored some portion of the Greenland coast. He made three successive voyages; but while exhibiting his own courage and resolution, he contributed nothing to the stores of geographical knowledge.

We now arrive at a name which deservedly ranks among the foremost of Arctic explorers—that of Henry Hudson. He contributed more to our acquaintance with the Polar seas than any one who had preceded him, and few of his successors have surpassed him in the extent and thoroughness of his researches.

He first appears, says Mr. Markham, fitting out a little cock-boat for the Muscovy Company, called the Hopewell (of eighty tons), to discover a passage by the North Pole. On the 1st of May 1607 he sailed from Greenwich. “When we consider the means with which he was provided for the achievement of this great discovery, we are astonished at the fearless audacity of the attempt. Here was a crew of twelve men and a boy, in a wretched little craft of eighty tons, coolly talking of sailing right across the Pole to Japan, and actually making as careful and judicious a trial of the possibility of doing so as has ever been effected by the best equipped modern expeditions.... Imagine this bold seaman sailing from Gravesend, bound for the North Pole, in a craft about the size of one of the smallest of modern collier brigs. We can form a good idea of her general appearance, because three such vessels are delineated on the chart drawn by Hudson himself. The Hopewell was more like an old Surat buggalow than anything else that now sails the seas, with high stern, and low pointed bow; she had no head-sails on her bowsprit, but, to make up for this, the foremast was stepped chock forward. There was a cabin under the high and narrow poop, where Hudson and his little son were accommodated; and the crew were crowded forward.”

Hudson first sighted land beyond the Arctic Circle in lat. 70°. It was the cold, grim coast of East Greenland. Three degrees further north a chain of lofty peaks, all bare of snow, rose upon the horizon, and Hudson’s men noted that the temperature daily increased in mildness. Steering to the north-east, the great navigator arrived off the shores of Spitzbergen, where some of his men landed and picked up various fragments of whalebone, horns of deer, walrus-teeth, and relics of other animals. To the north-west point of Spitzbergen he gave the name which it still bears—Hakluyt’s Headland. At one time he found himself as far north as 81°; and it seems probable that he discovered the Seven Islands: he remarked that the sea was in some places green, in others blue; and he says, “Our green sea we found to be freest from ice, and our azure-blue sea to be our icy sea;” an observation not confirmed by later navigators. The greenness was probably due to the presence of minute organisms.

Having completed a survey of the west coast of Spitzbergen, he resolved on sailing round the north end of Greenland, which he supposed to be an island, and returning to England by Davis Strait. With this view he again examined the sea between Spitzbergen and Greenland, but from the strong ice-blink along the northern horizon felt convinced that there was no passage in that direction. After sighting Spitzbergen, therefore, he determined to return to England; and on his homeward voyage discovered an island in lat. 71° N., which he named Hudson Sutches, and which has since been improperly named Jan Mayen. The Hopewell arrived in the Thames on the 15th of September.

The results of this voyage, says Mr. Markham, were very important, both in a geographical and a commercial point of view. Hudson had discovered a portion of the east coast of Greenland; he had examined the edge of the ice between Greenland and Spitzbergen twice—in June and in the end of July; and he had sailed to the northward of Spitzbergen until he was stopped by the ice, reaching almost as high a latitude as Scoresby in 1806, which was 81° 12′ 42″ N. Hudson’s highest latitude by observation was 80° 23’, but he sailed for two more days in a north-easterly direction. The practical consequence of his voyage was that his account of the quantities of whales and sea-horses in the Spitzbergen seas led to the establishment of a rich and prosperous fishery, which continued to flourish for two centuries.

In the following year Hudson made a second voyage, in the hope of discovering a north-eastern passage to China between Spitzbergen and Novaia Zemlaia. He exhibited his characteristic resolution, and forced his way to the very gate of the unknown region, which is still closed against human enterprise by an impenetrable barrier of ice; but all his efforts proved in vain, and he returned to Gravesend on the 26th of August.

In 1610, in a vessel of fifty-five tons, he once more entered the Polar seas, and gained the extreme point of Labrador, which he named Cape Wolstenholm. Here burst upon him the view of that magnificent sea which has since been associated with his name; and there can be no doubt that his enterprise would have anticipated the discoveries of later navigators, but for the mutiny which broke out among his crew, and eventually led to his being sent adrift, with nine faithful companions, in a small open boat. He was never again heard of.

The spirit of commercial enterprise and the love of maritime adventure were still strong enough in England to induce the equipment of further expeditions. In 1612 sailed Captain Button,—who discovered a stream, and named it Nelson River; where, at a later date, the Hudson Bay Company planted their first settlement. Here he wintered. In April 1613, on the breaking up of the ice, he resumed his work of exploration, and discovered, in lat. 65°, an island group, which he named Manuel, now known as Mansfield, Islands. Then he bore away for England, arriving in the Thames early in September.

Robert Bylot and William Baffin undertook a voyage in 1615. The latter had had some previous experience of Arctic navigation, which he turned to advantage in 1616, when he accompanied Bylot on a second expedition. Their ship, the Discovery, of fifty-five tons, reached Cape Hope Sanderson, the furthest point attained by Davis, on the 30th of May; and after meeting with some obstruction from the ice, proceeded northwards to 72° 45’, where she dropped anchor for awhile among the Women’s Islands. Baffin kept to the north until he found ice in 74° 15’ N., and he then ascended Melville Bay, touching the head of the great basin now known by his name, and sailing down its western coast. He arrived in Dover Roads on the 30th of August, after a brilliantly successful voyage, which had opened up the principal north-west channels into the Arctic Sea.

It is necessary here to interpolate a few remarks in explanation of the difficulties which beset the Baffin Bay route of Arctic exploration. Geographers assert, and the assertion seems confirmed by the experience of navigators, that a surface-current is constantly flowing down this bay, and carrying great fleets of icebergs and shoals of ice-floes into the Atlantic from its southern channels—Lancaster, Jones, and Smith Sounds. Hence, at the head of the bay there exists a considerable open and navigable expanse, which extends for some distance up Lancaster and Smith Sounds during the summer and early winter, and is known as the “North Water.” But between this open expanse and Davis Strait lies an immense mass of ice, averaging from one hundred and seventy to two hundred miles in width, and blocking up the centre of Baffin Bay, so as to interrupt the approach to the north-west end. This is known as the “middle pack,” and consists of some ancient floe-pieces of great thickness, which may have been brought down from a distant part of the Arctic seas; of a wide extent of ice accumulated during each winter, about six or eight feet in thickness; and of the grand and gigantic icebergs which are so characteristic a feature of the Melville Bay scenery. A very large quantity of this pack is destroyed in each succeeding summer by the thaws, or by the swell and warm temperature of the Atlantic as the ice drifts southward.

It is remarked of the Baffin Bay ice, that it is much lighter than that found in the Spitzbergen seas. The latter often occurs in single sheets, solid, transparent, and from twenty to thirty, and even forty, feet in thickness. In Baffin Bay the average thickness of the floes does not exceed five or six feet, and eight or ten feet is of very rare occurrence.

From Baffin’s voyage, in 1616, until 1817, no attempt was made to force this “middle pack” and enter the North Water; but now the voyage is made every year, and three routes have been opened up. The first is called the “North-about Passage,” and lies along the Greenland coast; the second, or “Middle Passage,” only possible late in the season, is by entering the drift-ice in the centre of the bay; and the third, or “Southern Passage,” also only possible late in the season, along the west side of Baffin Bay. Once in the North Water, whichever route be attempted, all obstacles to an exploration of the unknown region may be considered at an end. From Cape York to Smith Sound the sea is always navigable in the summer months.

It will thus be seen that the great highways to the Pole were discovered by William Baffin.

Our limits compel us to pass over the voyages of Stephen Bennet (1603–1610), Jonas Poole (1610–1613), and Captain Luke Fox (1631). In 1631 the merchants of Bristol despatched Captain Thomas James, but he made no additions to the discoveries of his predecessors. And then for nearly two centuries England abandoned her efforts to open up a communication between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

In 1818, however, the question of the existence of a North-West Passage once more occupied the public mind; and the British Government accordingly fitted out an exploring expedition, the Isabella and the Alexander, under the command of Captain Ross and Lieutenant Parry.

They sailed from England on the 18th of April, reached the southern edge of the Baffin Bay ice on the 2nd of July, and, after a detention of thirty-eight days, reached the North Water on August 8th. The capes on each side of the mouth of Smith Sound, Ross named after his two ships; and having accomplished this much, he affirmed that he saw land against the horizon at a distance of eight leagues, and then retraced his course, and sailed for England.

The British Government, however, refused to be discouraged by the failure of an expedition which had obviously been conducted with an entire absence of vigour and enterprise. They therefore equipped the Hecla and the Griper, and gave the command to Lieutenant Parry; who sailed from the Thames on the 5th of May 1819, and on the 15th of June sighted Cape Farewell. Striking northward, up Davis Strait and Baffin Bay, he found himself checked by the ice-barrier in lat. 73° N. A man of dauntless resolution, he came to the determination of forcing a passage at all hazards; and in seven days, by the exercise of a strong will, great sagacity, and first-rate seamanship, he succeeded in carrying his ships through the pack of ice, which measured eighty miles in breadth.

He was then able to enter Sir James Lancaster Sound; and up this noble inlet he proceeded with a fair wind, hopeful of entering the great Polar Sea. But after advancing a considerable distance, he was once more met by the frozen powers of the North, and this time he was forced to own himself vanquished. He accordingly returned towards the south, discovering Barrow Strait; and, more to the westward, an inlet which has since figured conspicuously in Arctic voyages—Wellington Channel. Bathurst Island he also added to the map; and afterwards he came in sight of Melville Island. On the 4th of September he attained the meridian of 110° W. long., and thus became entitled to the Parliamentary grant of £5000. A convenient harbour in the vicinity was named the “Bay of the Hecla and the Griper,” and here Lieutenant Parry resolved upon passing the winter.

In the following spring he resumed his adventurous course, and completed a very careful survey of the shores of Baffin Sea; after which he repaired to England, and reached the Thames in safety, with his crews in good health, and his ships in excellent condition, about the middle of November 1820.

Having done so much and so well, it was natural that Captain Parry should again be selected for employment in the Arctic seas in the following year. He hoisted his flag in his old ship, the Hecla, and was accompanied by the Fury; both vessels being equipped in the most liberal manner. He sailed from the Nore on the 8th of May 1821; he returned to the Shetland Islands on the 10th of October 1823. In the interval, a period of seven-and-twenty months, he discovered the Duke of York Bay, the numerous inlets which break up the northern coast-line of the American continent, Winter Island, the islands of Anatoak and Ooght, the Strait of the Fury and Hecla, Melville Peninsula, and Cockburn Island. During their winter sojourn on Winter Island, the English crews were surprised by a visit from a party of Eskimos, whose settlement Captain Parry visited in his turn. He found it an establishment of five huts, with canoes, sledges, dogs, and above sixty men, women, and children, as regularly, and, to all appearance, as permanently fixed as if they had occupied the same spot the whole winter. “If the first view,” says Parry, “of the exterior of this little village was such as to create astonishment, that feeling was in no small degree heightened on accepting the invitation soon given us to enter these extraordinary houses, in the construction of which we observed that not a single material was used but snow and ice. After creeping through two low passages, having each its arched doorway, we came to a small circular apartment, of which the roof was a perfect arched dome. From this three doorways, also arched, and of larger dimensions than the outward ones, led into as many inhabited apartments—one on each side, and the other facing us as we entered. The interior of these presented a scene no less novel than interesting: the women were seated on the beds at the sides of the huts, each having her little fireplace or lamp, with all her domestic utensils about her. The children crept behind their mothers, and the dogs shrank past us in dismay. The construction of this inhabited part of the hut was similar to that of the outer apartment,—being a dome, formed by separate blocks of snow laid with great regularity and no small art, each being cut into the shape requisite to form a substantial arch, from seven to eight feet high in the centre, and having no support whatever but what this principle of building supplies. Sufficient light was admitted into these curious edifices by a circular window of ice, neatly fitted into the roof of each apartment.”

In 1824–25 Captain Parry undertook a third voyage, but with less than his usual success. The Fury was driven ashore by the pressure of the pack-ice, and so damaged, that Parry found it needful to abandon her, and remove her crew and stores to the Hecla.

Sir John Parry’s fourth and last expedition, in 1827, was characterized by his bold attempt to cross the icy sea in light boats and sledges; resorting to the former when his progress was interrupted by pools of water, and to the latter in traversing the unbroken surface of the ice-fields. He was soon compelled, however, to abandon the sledges, on account of the hummocks and irregularities of the ice.

We agree with Mr. Cooley, that voluntarily to undertake the toil and brave the danger of such an expedition, required a zeal little short of enthusiasm. When the travellers reached a water-way, they were obliged to launch their boats and embark. On reaching the opposite side, their boats were then to be dragged, frequently up steep and perilous cliffs, their lading being first removed. By this laborious process, persevered in with little intermission, they contrived to accomplish eight miles in five days. They travelled only during the night, by which means they were less incommoded with snow-blindness; they found the ice more firm and consistent; and had the great advantage of lying down to sleep during the warmer portion of the twenty-four hours. Shortly after sunset they took their breakfast; then they laboured for a few hours before taking their principal meal. A little after midnight, towards sunrise, they halted as if for the night, smoked their pipes, looked over the icy desert in the direction in which the journey was to be resumed; and then, wrapping themselves in their furs, lay down to rest. Advancing as far north as 82° 40’, they were then compelled by the drifting of the snow-fields to retrace their steps. They regained their ships on the 21st of August, and sailed for England.

We must now go back a few years. In May 1819, an overland expedition was despatched to ascertain the exact position of the Coppermine River, to descend it to its mouth, and to explore the coast of the Arctic Sea on either hand. The command was given to Lieutenant Franklin, who was accompanied by Dr. Richardson the naturalist, by Messrs. Hood and Back, two English midshipmen, and two picked seamen. The expedition was spread over a period of two years and a half, and the narrative of what was accomplished and endured by its members reads like a romance. They reached the mouth of the Coppermine, and then launched their little barks on the chill waters of the Polar Sea. With much perseverance, and after encountering some serious obstacles, they made their way along its shores in a westerly direction as far as Point Turnagain, in lat. 68° 30’ N. Between this headland on the east, and Cape Barrow on the west, opens a deep gulf, stretching inland as far as the Arctic Circle, Franklin named it George the Fourth’s Coronation Gulf; and describes it as studded with numerous islands, and indented with sounds affording excellent harbours, all of them supplied with small rivers of fresh water, abounding with salmon, trout, and other fish.

Passing over Franklin’s after-labours in the great cause of Arctic Discovery, labours which secured him the well-merited reward of knighthood, we come to that last voyage, which helped, as we shall see, to solve the problem of a North-West Passage, but was the cause of one of the saddest chapters in the history of Maritime Enterprise.

It was in the spring of 1845 that Sir John Franklin, in command of the Erebus and the Terror, with Captain Crozier, an experienced Arctic navigator, as his lieutenant, and at the head of one hundred and thirty-seven picked seamen, brave, resolute, and hardy, once more sailed for the Polar waters.

On the 8th of June he left the Orkneys, and a month later arrived in Baffin Bay. About the end of July some whaling-ships in Melville Bay saw the Erebus and Terror contending gallantly with the ice which impeded their progress to Lancaster Sound. On the evening of the 26th the ice opened up, and the two discovery-ships sailed away into the north-western seas.

Two years passed, and no news reached England of Franklin and his companions. As day succeeded day, and week followed week, and still no tidings came, men grew anxious, and then alarmed; “expectation darkened into anxiety, anxiety into dread.” At last, it was determined to institute a search for the missing heroes. An expedition was sent out under Sir James Ross; another under Sir John Richardson; but neither obtained any information. By many all hope was then abandoned; and the fate of Franklin was regarded as one of those mysteries which the historian in vain attempts to unravel. He and his men had perished; of that there could be no reasonable doubt. Yet a few were sanguine enough to believe that they had taken refuge among the Eskimos, or were dragging out a weary existence in some remote wilderness, in expectation of help from home. Franklin’s brave and noble wife was one of those who, whatever they feared or hoped, were, at all events, determined not to rest until some accurate information had been gained. And round her gathered the most eminent scientific men of the day, whose influence combined with the general sympathy of the people to encourage the Government in a further effort.

It was in 1850 that the first clue to the position of the Erebus and Terror was secured in Beechey Island, through the accidental detention there of the searching expeditions of Captains Austin and Penny.

They were bound for Melville Island, but on reaching the entrance of Wellington Channel (August 1850), were met by such immense fields of ice sweeping down it and out of Barrow Strait, that they were glad to seek shelter in a great bay at the eastern end of the channel,—a bay almost bisected, as it were, by Beechey Island. On the 23rd, a boat from Captain Ommaney’s ship, the Assistance, happened to land on one of the extreme points of the bay; and the crew, in the course of their wanderings, were not a little surprised to discover traces of a former visit from Europeans. Under the lofty cliff of Cape Riley they came upon the groundwork of a tent, scraps of canvas and rope, a quantity of birds’ bones and feathers, and a long-handled rake which, apparently, had been used for collecting the rich rare weeds that cover the bottom of the Arctic waters.

That Europeans had been encamped there, was certain, but not a name or record associated the remains with Franklin’s expedition. News of the discovery, however, reached Captain Penny, an Aberdeen seaman, who had been employed by the British Admiralty as leader of a separate expedition; and in conjunction with Lieutenant de Haven, of the United States Navy, who was in command of the expedition liberally equipped by Mr. Grinnell, of New York, he resolved to examine the east coast of Wellington Channel with minute care, in the belief that some memorials of Franklin would thus be discovered.

From a point called Cape Spenser, the Americans, on foot, pursued the trail of a sledge up the east side of Wellington Channel, until, at one day’s journey beyond Cape Innis, it suddenly ceased, as if the party had there turned back again. A bottle and a piece of The Times newspaper were the only relics which fell into the hands of the searchers. Meantime, Captain Penny had anchored his ships under the western point of Beechey Island, and despatched a boat to take up the clue at Cape Riley, and follow it to the eastward, in the event of the traces being those of a party retreating from the ships, supposing them to have been ice-bound in the north-west, to Baffin Bay. This boat-party eventually returned unsuccessful; but, one afternoon, some men belonging to the Lady Franklin asked leave, and obtained it, for the purpose of a ramble over Beechey Island. They sauntered along towards the low projecting portion of the island which extends northward, choosing a convenient spot to cross the huge ridges of ice which lay piled up along the beach; they were seen to mount the acclivity or backbone of the point. In a minute afterwards their friends on board the ships (says Admiral Sherard Osborn) saw the party rush simultaneously towards a dark object, round which they collected, with signs of great excitement. Presently one ran hither, one thither. Feverish with anxiety, those on board knew immediately that some fresh traces had been found, and a general sortie took place to Beechey Island. “Eh, sir,” said a gallant Scotch mariner, when relating the discovery—“eh, sir, my heart was in my mouth, and I didna ken I could rin so fast afore.”

And what had been found?

A cairn, of a pyramidal form, which had evidently been constructed with much care. The base consisted of a series of preserved-meat tins, filled with gravel and sand; and more tins were so arranged as to taper gradually upwards to the summit of the cairn, in which was planted the fragment of a broken boarding-pike. To all appearance it had been purposely raised for the reception of some documental record, yet nothing could be found in or about the spot, in spite of the most persevering efforts. But presently looking along the northern slope of the island, other strange objects caught the eye. Another rush of anxious excited beings, and they stood before three graves; and many of them brushed away the unwonted tear as they read upon their humble tablets the words Erebus and Terror.

Captain Austin followed up Captain Penny in his explorations of the Arctic wastes, but no further information was obtained of Franklin’s movements. It was impossible to determine whether on his way home he had perished in Baffin Bay; whether he had struck to the north-west by Wellington Channel; or whether he was haply imprisoned in Melville Island.

We have no space, nor is it necessary, to dwell on the records of the various searching expeditions fitted out by the Government, or by Lady Franklin and her friends. It must be noted, however, that one of these, led by Captain (afterwards Sir) Robert M’Clure, succeeded in accomplishing the enterprise in which Franklin perished, and, entering the Northern Ocean by Behring Strait, actually forced its way, through snow and ice, into the Atlantic. The North-West Passage, so long sought, was thus discovered; but the discovery, though interesting and valuable from a geographical point of view, was followed by no commercial results. In truth, it proved that the route along the north-west of the American Continent could never be practicable for ordinary vessels.

It may be asserted that nearly all men had abandoned hope and expectation of ascertaining any exact particulars of the fate of Franklin and his followers, when, towards the close of the autumn of 1854, Dr. Rae, a well-known traveller and Arctic explorer, suddenly appeared in England, bringing with him the most curious evidence of the disasters which had overwhelmed a party that had evidently been travelling from the ice-bound Erebus and Terror towards the Great Fish River. Dr. Rae had ascertained from some Eskimos with whom he had been travelling that this party numbered forty persons, and that all had died of starvation four years prior to Dr. Rae’s visit. The unfortunate “white men” had been first seen on King William’s Land; later in the same year their dead bodies had been observed near or about the mouth of the Great Fish River (1850). Dr. Rae brought home numerous pieces of silver plate obtained from the Eskimos, which were marked with the names of officers of the two ships. Lady Franklin was encouraged by this intelligence to urge upon the Government the propriety of despatching an expedition to the points indicated by the Eskimos; but the Government contented themselves with applying to the Hudson Bay Company. The result was an overland expedition in 1855 to the mouth of the Great Fish River, by Mr. Anderson, one of the Company’s chief officers. He had no boat with him capable of reaching King William’s Land, though it was only sixty miles distant from the point he attained, nor was he accompanied by an Eskimo interpreter. He ascertained, however, that only a portion of the officers and men of the Erebus and Terror had reached the Great Fish River—some forty of them, very possibly, as Dr. Rae had been informed; these forty, with the three graves upon Beechey Island, still leaving ninety-five persons unaccounted for.

Lady Franklin and her friends continued to press upon Government the need for further inquiry; but finding the responsible ministers unwilling to interfere in what they had come to consider a hopeless enterprise, they contrived, with some help from the public, to purchase and fit out a strongly-built screw-schooner, of which Captain M’Clintock volunteered to take the command.

He sailed from England in the summer of 1857; reached Melville Bay in safety, but was then held fast by the floating ice. The winter, however, came and went without any injury to him and his gallant band; and on the 27th of July 1858, the Fox stretched across to Lancaster Sound. On the 11th of August she arrived at Beechey Island, and replenished her diminished stores from the depôts left there by previous expeditions. Then she pushed to the westward, past Cape Hotham and Griffith Island, southward through Sir Robert Peel Channel, and so into Prince Regent Inlet. Having arrived off the eastern entrance of Bellot Strait, she found it blocked up by a wall of ice, and from the 20th of August to the 6th of September she watched for an opportunity of breaking through it. On the 6th she made the passage, but only to find the other end obstructed by an impassable ice-barrier; and, after five fruitless attempts, her captain brought her to anchor for the winter in Port Kennedy, on the northern side of the strait.

When the new year opened, M’Clintock resolved on undertaking sledge excursions in various directions, with the view of obtaining some information of Franklin and his expedition. In one of them, at Cape Victoria, on the west coast of Boothia (lat. 69° 50’ N., long. 96° W.), he ascertained from the natives that, several years previously, a ship had been wrecked off the northern shores of King William’s Land; that all her crew landed safely, and set off on a journey to the Great Fish River, where they died. Again: in April, falling in with the same party of Eskimos, they learned further, that besides the ship which had sunk in deep water, another had been driven ashore by the ice. Captain M’Clintock thereupon crossed to Montreal Island, travelled round the estuary of the Great Fish River, and visited Point Ogle and Barrow Island. On May 7, he fell in with an old Eskimo woman, who told him that many of the white men dropped by the way as they made towards the Great Fish River; that some were buried, and some were not. Proceeding in what he conceived to have been the route of the retreating crews, he discovered, near Point Herschel, a bleached skeleton; evidently that of one who had fallen behind the main body, from weakness and fatigue, and had died where he had fallen.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Hobson, who had started with another sledging party, had made the important discovery of a record, giving a brief account of the Franklin expedition up to the time when the ships were lost. It was found within a cairn constructed on Point Victory, and it set forth the following particulars:—

The Erebus and Terror spent their first winter at Beechey Island, in the spot discovered by Penny and Austin’s expedition; but they had previously explored Wellington Channel as far as 73° N., and passed down again into Barrow Strait, between Cornwallis and Bathurst Land. In 1846 the two ships seem to have sailed through Peel Channel, until caught in the ice off King William’s Land, on the 12th of September. In May 1847, Lieutenant Graham Gore and Mr. des Vœux landed, and erected a cairn a few miles south of Point Victory, and deposited in it a document which stated that, on that day, all were well, with Sir J. Franklin in command. Within a month, however, that illustrious navigator died (June 11), and thus was spared the terrible trials which afflicted his followers. The ice did not move, and the winter of 1847–48 closed in upon them. It proved fatal to nine officers and fifteen men. On April 22, 1848, the two ships, which had been imprisoned for upwards of nineteen months, were deserted, and the officers and crews, one hundred and five in number, under the command of Captains Crozier and Fitzjames, started for the Great Fish River.

At the cairn and all about it lay a great quantity of clothing and other articles, which the sufferers had found from experience of three days to be a heavier weight than their enfeebled strength was able to drag.

From this point to a spot about midway between Point Victory and Point Herschel nothing of much importance was discovered, and the skeletons as well as relics were deeply embedded in snow. At this midway station, however, the top of a piece of wood projecting out of the snow was seen by Lieutenant Hobson, and on digging round it a boat was discovered. It stood on a very heavy sledge, and within it were a couple of skeletons. The one in the bottom of the stern-sheets was covered with a great quantity of thrown-off clothing; the other, in the bows, seemed to have been that of some poor fellow who had crept there to look out, and in that position fallen into his last sleep. A couple of guns, loaded and ready cocked, stood upright to hand, as it they had been prepared for use against wild animals. Around this boat was another accumulation of cast-off articles; and it was the belief of M’Clintock that the party in charge of her were returning to the ships, as it they discovered their strength unequal to the terrible journey before them. It may be assumed, however, that the stronger portion of the crews still pushed on with another boat, and that some reached Montreal Island and ascended the Great Fish River.

The point, says Sherard Osborn, at which the fatal imprisonment of the Erebus and Terror in 1846 took place, was only ninety miles from the spot reached by Dease and Simpson in their boats in 1838–39, coming from the east. Ninety miles more of open water, and Franklin and his gallant crew would have not only won the prize they sought, but reached their homes to wear their well-earned honours. “It was not to be so. Let us bow in humility and awe to the inscrutable decrees of that Providence who ruled it otherwise. They were to discover the great highway between the Pacific and the Atlantic. It was given them to win for their country a discovery for which she had risked her sons and lavishly spent her wealth through many centuries; but they were to die in accomplishing their last great earthly task: and, still more strange, but for the energy and devotion of the wife of their chief and leader, it would in all probability never have been known that they were indeed the First Discoverers of the North-West Passage.”

We have thought it for the convenience of our readers to set before them an uninterrupted narrative of the exertions made to ascertain the fate of Franklin and his companions by English seamen under English influence; but we must now return to 1853, to chronicle the American expedition under Dr. Kane—which did not, indeed, succeed in its primary object, but made some remarkable additions to our knowledge of the Polar Regions.

Dr. Elisha Kane sailed from Boston in 1853, in command of the Advance, with a crew of seventeen officers and men, to whom two Greenlanders were subsequently added.

On the 7th of August he passed the two great headlands which guard the entrance of Smith Sound,—Cape Isabella and Cape Alexander, discovered and named in the preceding year by Captain Inglefield,—and after a voyage of equal difficulty and danger reached Rensselaer Bay on the east coast of the sound, where he passed the winter. A few extracts from his diary will show under what conditions, and in what circumstances, Kane and his followers passed the long and dreary winter months:—

“October 28th.—The moon has reached her greatest northern declination of about 25° 35’. She is a glorious object; sweeping around the heavens, at the lowest part of her curve, she is still 14° above the horizon. For eight days she has been making her circuit with nearly unvarying brightness. It is one of those sparkling nights that bring back the memory of sleigh-bells and songs, and glad communings of hearts in lands that are far away.

“November 7th.—The darkness is coming on with insidious steadiness, and its advances can only be perceived by comparing one day with its fellow of some time back. We still read the thermometer at noonday without a light, and the black masses of the hills are plain for about five hours, with their glaring patches of snow; but all the rest is darkness. The stars of the sixth magnitude shine out at noonday. Except upon the island of Spitzbergen, which has the advantages of an insular climate, and tempered by ocean-currents, no Christians have wintered in so high a latitude as this. They are Russian sailors who made the encounter there—men inured to hardships and cold. Our darkness has ninety days to run before we shall get back again even to the contested twilight of to-day. Altogether our winter will have been sunless for one hundred and forty days.

“December 15th.—We have lost the last vestige of our mid-day twilight. We cannot see print, and hardly paper; the finger’s cannot be counted a foot from the eyes. Noonday and midnight are alike; and, except a vague glimmer in the sky that seems to define the hill outlines to the south, we have nothing to tell us that this Arctic world of ours has a sun. In the darkness, and consequent inaction, it is almost in vain that we seek to create topics of thought, and, by a forced excitement, to ward off the encroachments of disease.”

But in due time the long Arctic night passed away, and the season came round for undertaking the sledge journeys which were the main object of the expedition. But Dr. Kane was then met by a new difficulty. Out of the nine splendid Newfoundland and thirty-five Eskimo dogs which he had originally possessed, only six had survived a peculiar malady that had seized them during the winter; and though some fresh purchases were made from the Eskimos who visited Rensselaer Harbour early in April, his means of transport remained wholly inadequate.

Kane, moreover, who though strong of heart was weak of body, had suffered much from the rigour of the climate, and was in a sadly feeble condition when, on the 25th of April 1854, he started on his northward journey. He found the Greenland coast, as he ascended Kane Sea, full of romantic surprises; the cliffs rising to a height of ten hundred and eleven hundred feet, and presenting the boldest and most fantastic outlines. This character is continued as far as the Great Humboldt Glacier. The coast is indented by four great bays, all of them communicating with deep gorges, which are watered by streams from the interior ice-fields. The mean height of the table-land, till it reaches the bed of the Great Glacier, Dr. Kane estimated, in round numbers, at 900 feet; its tallest summit near the water at 1300, and the rise of the background above the general level at 600 more. The face of this stupendous ice-mass, as it defined the coast, was everywhere an abrupt and threatening precipice, only broken by clefts and deep ravines, giving breadth and interest to its wild expression.