splendid
reputation and ability as an organizer made him, though now fifty-nine
years of age, the unanimous choice of the government for the most
elaborate arctic expedition it had prepared in many years. Franklin's
fame and experience, and that of Crozier and his other lieutenants, who
had seen much service in the north, his able ships, the Terror and the
Erebus, which had just returned from a voyage of unusual success to
the Antarctic, and his magnificent equipment, aroused the enthusiasm
of the British to the highest pitch and justified them in their hopes for
bringing the wearying struggle for the Northwest Passage to an
immediate conclusion.
For more than a year everything prospered with the party. By
September, 1846, Franklin had navigated the vessels almost within
sight of the coast which he had explored twenty years previously, and
beyond which the route to Bering Sea was well known. The prize was
nearly won when the ships became imprisoned by the ice for the winter,
a few miles north of King William Land. The following June Franklin
died; the ice continued impenetrable, and did not loosen its grip all that
year. In July, 1848, Crozier, who had succeeded to the command, was
compelled to abandon the ships, and, with the 105 survivors who were
all enfeebled by the three successive winters in the Arctic, started on
foot for Back River. How far they got we shall probably never know.
Meanwhile, when Franklin failed to return in 1848--he was provisioned
for only three years--England became alarmed and despatched relief
expeditions by sea from the Bering Sea and the Atlantic and by land
north from Canada, but all efforts failed to gather news of Franklin till
1854, when Rae fell in with some Eskimo hunters near King William
Land, who told him of two ships that were beset some years previous,
and of the death of all the party from starvation.
In 1857 Lady Franklin, not content with this bare and indirect report of
her husband's fate, sacrificed a fortune to equip a searching party to be
commanded by Leopold McClintock, one of the ablest and toughest
travelers over the ice the world has ever known. In 1859 McClintock
verified the Eskimos' sad story by the discovery on King William Land
of a record dated April, 1848, which told of Franklin's death and of the
abandonment of the ships. He also found among the Eskimos silver
plate and other relics of the party; elsewhere he saw one of Franklin's
boats on a sledge, with two skeletons inside and clothing and chocolate;
in another place he found tents and flags; and elsewhere he made the
yet more ghastly discovery of a bleached human skeleton prone on its
face, as though attesting the truthfulness of an Eskimo woman who,
claiming to have seen forty of the survivors late in 1848, said "they fell
down and died as they walked."
The distinction of being the first to make the Northwest Passage, which
Franklin so narrowly missed, fell to Robert McClure (1850-53) and
Richard Collinson (1850-55), who commanded the two ships sent north
through Bering Strait to search for Franklin. McClure accomplished the
passage on foot after losing his ship in the ice in Barrow Strait, but
Collinson brought his vessel safely through to England. The Northwest
Passage was not again made until Roald Amundsen navigated the tiny
Gjoa, a sailing sloop with gasoline engine, from the Atlantic to the
Pacific, 1903-06.
Yankee whalers each year had been venturing further north in Davis
Strait and Baffin Bay and Bering Sea, but America had taken no active
part in polar exploration until the sympathy aroused by the tragic
disappearance of Franklin induced Henry Grinnell and George Peabody
to send out the Advance in charge of Elisha Kent Kane to search for
Franklin north of Smith Sound. In spite of inexperience, which resulted
in scurvy, fatal accidents, privations, and the loss of his ship, Kane's
achievements (1853-55) were very brilliant. He discovered and entered
Kane Basin, which forms the beginning of the passage to the polar
ocean, explored both shores of the new sea, and outlined what has since
been called the American route to the Pole.
Sixteen years later (1871) another American, Charles Francis Hall, who
had gained much arctic experience by a successful search for additional
traces and relics of Franklin (1862-69), sailed the Polaris through Kane
Basin and Kennedy Channel, also through Hall Basin and Robeson
Channel, which he discovered, into the polar ocean itself, thus
completing the exploration of the outlet which Kane had begun. He
took his vessel to the then unprecedented (for a ship) latitude of 82° 11´.
But Hall's explorations, begun so auspiciously, were suddenly
terminated by his tragic death in November from over-exertion caused
by a long sledge journey.
When the ice
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