Christopher Middleton—Wager River—Repulse Bay—Parry's second north-west voyage—Melville Peninsula—Fury and Hecla Strait—John Ross's second Arctic voyage—Introduces steam navigation into the Arctic regions—The whaler John—Ross misses the North-West Passage—Snow houses—Eskimo geographers—James Clark Ross finds the Magnetic North Pole—Lyon in the Griper—Back in the Terror—Rae's journey round Committee Bay—Sir John Franklin's last voyage—Kennedy and Bellot—Discovery of Bellot Strait—Rae's journey in 1854—His Franklin discoveries—M'Clintock's voyage in the Fox—Lady Franklin's instructions—Captain Charles Hall—Frederick Schwatka—Amundsen accomplishes the North-West Passage.

In July, 1742, Christopher Middleton, working northwards in Hudson Bay from Fort Churchill, made his way up Rowe's Welcome and entered a deep inlet apparently leading to the South Sea. Middleton—who gained his Fellowship of the Royal Society for his variation observations at Fort Churchill, and was the first to practise the modern method of finding longitude by eight or ten different altitudes of the sun or stars when near the prime vertical—spent eighteen days in the inlet observing the tides, and then came to the conclusion that it was an estuary; and he named it Wager River after Sir Charles Wager, who was First Lord of the Admiralty when he began his voyage. Proceeding north, he reached his Repulse Bay, and at the north-east end of it saw Frozen Strait, as he called it, stretching away along the north of Southampton Island towards Cape Comfort. Here, also from tidal observations, he satisfied himself that Repulse Bay afforded no passage to the westward and that Frozen Strait led into Fox Channel.

His opinions were disputed by those who only knew the coast from his chart, and two vessels were sent out to prove he was wrong. The reports of the captains of these—there is no need to mention their names—were embarrassing. Neither had been to Repulse Bay, but both had been to Wager River, and they agreed that it was unmistakably a river and not a strait; but in every other respect, even in naming the places they had seen, they were at variance. Thus the matter was left in sufficient doubt to encourage some people in believing in a north-west passage through Repulse Bay, just at the Arctic Circle, and to seek this, Parry, on his return from Melville Island, was despatched on his second voyage.

This time the Hecla was commanded by George Francis Lyon—the North African traveller—Parry being in the Fury, a sister ship; both vessels, at Parry's suggestion, being exactly alike so that their gear and fittings were interchangeable. They sailed from the Little Nore on the 8th of May, 1821, and going direct up Frozen Strait, with much trouble from the ice, ran into Repulse Bay on the 22nd of August. Here after a careful examination it was ascertained beyond a doubt that no passage existed through to the westward. "Thus," says Lyon, "the veracity of poor Middleton, as far as regards this bay at least, was now at length established; and in looking down the strait we had passed, he was fully justified in calling it a frozen strait. We were now indisputably on our scene of future action, the coast of America; and it only remained for us to follow minutely the line of shore in continuation from Repulse Bay."

During a stay at Gore Bay red snow was brought off to the Fury, its colour being much fainter than that found in the Isabella voyage at Crimson Cliffs in Greenland; "the appearance of the mass was not unlike what is called raspberry ice, in a far better climate, where cold is made subservient to luxury." The colouring of this is due to one of the AlgÆ, Protococcus nivalis, and not as Peter Paterson said in 1671—ninety years before De Saussure—to the rocks being "full of white, red, and yellow veins, like marble; upon any alteration of the weather, these stones sweat, which, together with the rains, tinges the snow red." The day on which this snow was found, the 30th of August, was so warm that the party were glad to pull off their coats and waistcoats. "The valleys were fertile in grasses and moss; and the fineness of the weather had drawn forth a number of butterflies, spiders, and other insects, which would, by their gay colours and active motions, have almost deceived us into an idea that we were not in the Arctic regions, had not the Frozen Strait, filled with huge masses of moving ice, reminded us but too forcibly, that we were in the most dangerous of them."

Early in October the ships took up their quarters at Winter Island on the coast of Melville Peninsula in 66° 32´, and there, during the cordial intercourse with the Eskimos, Parry heard of the way through further north which led him on his release in the following July to discover Fury and Hecla Strait, along which the ships passed to find their progress blocked by the ice just beyond its entrance into Regent Inlet. Returning through the strait, they reached the island of Igloolik at the eastern entrance, and there they passed the winter, Igloolik being an important Eskimo settlement, with four fixed places of residence on it, to which as the season changes the natives move in rotation. From this island, as the health of the men did not permit of his venturing to spend another winter in the ice, Parry retraced his route and returned to England.

The ships dropped anchor in the Thames on Trafalgar Day, 1823. Next year, on the 19th of May, they were off again to the north to seek a passage to the west down Prince Regent Inlet, Parry in the Hecla, Hoppner in the Fury. It was a bad season. The ships were late in leaving Baffin Bay and were hindered by new ice in Lancaster Sound. So far from reaching the strait discovered two years before, they could get no further south than Port Bowen, in 73° 12´, where they spent the winter in a singularly barren part of Cockburn Land. Starting in July they went down to Cresswell Bay, the ships being forced by the weather and the ice to work—as is not unusual under such circumstances—in almost every possible direction within every mile, their track—as shown in the illustration—being most complicated. The end of it all was that the Fury was wrecked and her stores carefully taken out and left, on what was named Fury Beach, for the use of future callers in want of them. And the Hecla came home alone.

Four years afterwards Captain John Ross, anxious for further work in the north, started in search of the passage by the same route. After some years of effort he had succeeded in organising an expedition, the expenses of which to the amount of over £17,000 were borne by Felix Booth, with the exception of over £2000 added by Ross himself. It was a memorable voyage in many respects, and for one thing in particular that is frequently passed unnoticed. This was the introduction of steam into Arctic navigation. The Victory was an old Isle of Man packet-boat of eighty-five tons, which, by raising her sides five feet, Ross increased to one hundred and fifty tons. Taking out her old paddles, he replaced them with a pair of Robertson's patents, hoistable out of water in a minute, so as to clear the ice. The engine was also a patent, by Braithwaite and Ericsson, who built the Novelty that appeared at Rainhill. But neither Braithwaite nor Ericsson was any happier in this production. Its great feature was the doing away with the funnel, no flue being required owing to the fires being kept going by artificial draught derived from two bellows of unequal sizes—"the bellows draught," in fact, like that of the Novelty which broke down in the great locomotive contest won by the Rocket. Had not Ross been a man of enterprise he would never have ventured to sea with such an experimental arrangement; but he did, and he suffered for it.

The "execrable machinery," as he inadequately called it, went wrong from the first. On the way from Galleons Reach to Woolwich, part of it became displaced, causing a delay for repairs. At Woolwich, Sir Byam Martin, the Comptroller of the Navy, and Sir John Franklin went on board and said uncomplimentary things about it, as also did the Duke of Orleans (afterwards King Louis Philippe) and the Duke of Chartres, though the Frenchmen were more gentle in their phrases. From Woolwich to Margate this remarkable engine, aided by the sails, took the Victory in just over twelve hours, the boiler leaking so much that the additional forcing pump had to be kept working by hand all the time. Passing the Lizard, the piston-rod was found to be so much worn on one side by friction against the guide-wheels that a piece of iron had to be brazed on to it. Then the keys of the main shaft broke and the substitutes made on board broke one after the other. "The boilers also continued to leak, though we had put dung and potatoes in them by Mr. Ericsson's directions." The air-pump drew quantities of water; the feeding pump was insufficient to supply the boiler. The big bellows nearly wore out; so did the small one. Off the Mull of Galloway the stoker fell into the machinery and had his arm crushed and nearly severed above the elbow. Then the teeth of the fly-wheel of the small bellows were shorn off, and the boiler joints gave way, and the water, or rather the potato soup, flowed out of the furnace doors and put out the fire.

Enough has been said to show the difficulties under which Ross first used steam on a voyage to the northern seas. The list of damages need not be continued. Every constituent part of the apparatus gave way in turn; and when the Victory became imprisoned for the winter, and the engineering staff had some time on their hands, they employed it in taking what was left of the installation, piece by piece, out of the ship, laying it on the ice, and leaving it there.

Ross was to be accompanied by the whaler John, but the men mutinied and refused to start, so that he went on from Loch Ryan alone. The following year the crew of the John, then on a whaling voyage in Baffin Bay, again mutinied, killed the master, put the mate adrift in a boat in the manner of Henry Hudson, and lost the ship on the western coast, where most of them were drowned.

With the Krusenstern, a boat of eighteen tons, in tow, Ross crossed the Atlantic, sighting Sanderson's Hope on the 29th of July, having left Scotland six weeks before. Early in August he sailed through Lancaster Sound, and, taking the opportunity of removing his Croker's Mountains to the north-east corner of North Somerset, went down Prince Regent Inlet to Fury Beach. After completing his provisions for twenty-seven months from the stores left behind by Parry, he crossed Cresswell Bay, passed Cape Garry, Parry's farthest south, on the 15th of August, and next day, Sunday, "I went on shore," he says, "with all the officers, to take formal possession of the new-discovered land; and at one o'clock, being a few minutes after seven in London, the colours were displayed with the usual ceremony, and the health of the King drunk, together with that of the founder of our expedition, after whom the land was named."

"From the highest part of this land, which was upwards of a hundred feet above the level of the sea," he continues, "we had a good view of the bay and the adjoining shores, and had the satisfaction to find that the ice was in motion and fast clearing away. We therefore resolved to wait patiently till we could see an opening; and proceeded to the northern quarter of this spot to make some observations on the dip of the magnetic needle.... To this place I gave the name Brown Island, after the amiable sister of Mr. Booth; the inlet was named Brentford Bay, and the islands Grimble Islands." And in his book is a beautiful steel engraving by W. Chevalier, "Taking Possession. Cape Hussard, Grimble Isle, Brentford Bay, Brown's Island." In short, Ross found the place, landed on it, took possession of it, named it and sketched it. "The sketches from which the drawings were made were taken by Mr. Ronald's invaluable perspective instrument, and therefore must be true delineations."

And Ross passed on, apparently quite pleased with himself. But the Fates had again been against him, for this was the very North-West Passage he had come specially to find; the bay, as Kennedy was to show, being the entrance to Bellot Strait in which the Fox was to winter when on the Franklin search. He had blundered along from the island of North Somerset to the mainland of America, and passed unheeded its northernmost point, which M'Clintock was to name Cape Murchison.

Working down the coast of the newly-named Boothia, the Victory reached Felix Harbour, and there she wintered. No Eskimos were seen until the 9th of January, when thirty-one came to the ship and were invited on board, a return visit being paid next day to their village, which Ross named North Hendon. As this was a typical Eskimo snow camp we may as well copy his picture and quote his description.

"The village soon appeared, consisting of twelve snow huts, erected at the bottom of a little bight on the shore, about two miles and a half from the ship. They had the appearance of inverted basins, and were placed without any order; each of them having a long crooked appendage, in which was the passage, at the entrance of which were the women, with the female children and the infants. We were soon invited to visit these, for whom we had prepared presents of glass beads and needles; a distribution of which soon drove away the timidity which they had displayed at our first appearance. The passage, always long, and generally crooked, led to the principal apartment, which was a circular dome, being ten feet in diameter when intended for one family, and an oval of fifteen by ten where it lodged two. Opposite the doorway there was a bank of snow, occupying nearly a third of the breadth of the area, about two feet and a half high, level at the top, and covered by various skins, forming the general bed or sleeping place for the whole. At the end of this sat the mistress of the house, opposite to the lamp, which, being of moss and oil, as is the universal custom in these regions, gave a sufficient flame to supply both light and heat; so that the apartment was perfectly comfortable. Over the lamp was the cooking dish of stone, containing the flesh of deer and of seals, with oil; and of such provision there seemed no want. Everything else, dresses, implements, as well as provisions, lay about in unspeakable confusion, showing that order, at least, was not in the class of their virtues. It was much more interesting to us to find, that among this disorder there were some fresh salmon; since, when they could find this fish, we were sure that it would also furnish us with supplies which we could not too much multiply. On inquiry, we were informed that they were abundant; and we had, therefore, the prospect of a new amusement, as well as of a valuable market at the mere price of our labour."

A few weeks later Ross was to see how these houses were built. "Four families," he says, "comprising fifteen persons, passed the ship to erect new huts about half a mile to the southward. They had four heavy-laden sledges, drawn each by two or three dogs, but proceeded very slowly. We went after them to see the process of building the snow house, and were surprised at their dexterity; one man having closed in his roof within forty-five minutes. A tent is scarcely pitched sooner than a house is here built. The whole process is worth describing. Having ascertained, by the rod used in examining seal holes, whether the snow is sufficiently deep and solid, they level the intended spot by a wooden shovel, leaving beneath a solid mass of snow not less than three feet thick. Commencing then in the centre of the intended circle, which is ten feet or more in diameter, different wedge-shaped blocks are cut out, about two feet long, and a foot thick at the outer part; then trimming them accurately by the knife, they proceed upwards until the courses, gradually inclining inwards, terminate in a perfect dome. The door being cut out from the inside before it is quite closed serves to supply the upper materials. In the meantime the women are employed in stuffing the joints with snow, and the boys in constructing kennels for the dogs. The laying the snow sofa with skins and the insertion of the ice window complete the work; the passage only remaining to be added, as it is after the house is finished, together with some smaller huts for stores"—the design being similar to that of the yurts of the Eskimos of the north, with a change of material, snow for stone, and ice instead of seal-gut for the window over the entrance.

Making friends with the Eskimos, and gaining a great reputation by the carpenter fitting one of them with a wooden leg, Ross obtained much valuable information from them, particularly as to the geography of the district. Like all Arctic men, he was impressed by their quickness in understanding maps and their skill in drawing them upon anything, snow, paper, or otherwise, that lay handy. One of them, Ikmallik, drew in the ship's cabin a map, which he reprints in his book, showing the coast-line of the country south of the Victory's quarters, with the capes, inlets, and islands, giving the isthmus of Boothia and Committee Bay, and Repulse Bay on the other side of the Melville Peninsula, which is really wonderful, for neither the Eskimo, nor Ross, had anything to copy from, it being nearly twenty years before Rae's exploration; and the one thing it clearly demonstrated was that there was no waterway to the westward, south of Felix Harbour.

Ross owed much to Ikmallik, and really a good deal of the time of the expedition was spent in confirming the statements of that well-informed man. The west coast of Boothia was surveyed down to Bulow Bay; the east side from Cape Nicholas down to Cape Porter, including the crossing of the upper part of James Ross Strait, the discovery of Matty Island and the north-east coast of King William Land from Cape Landon, opposite Cape Porter—where Ross, as usual, missed a strait—westward to capes Franklin and Jane Franklin, within sight of which in the days that were coming, by one of those remarkable coincidences so frequent in the north, the Erebus and Terror were to meet their fate.

The one conspicuous triumph of the expedition was the journey of James Ross to the site of the Magnetic North Pole, which he found on the western coast of Boothia on the 1st of June, 1831. In the younger Ross's own words, "the land at this place is very low near the coast, but it rises into ridges of fifty or sixty feet high about a mile inland. We could have wished that a place so important had possessed more of mark or note. It was scarcely censurable to regret that there was not a mountain to indicate a spot to which so much of interest must ever be attached; and I could even have pardoned any one among us who had been so romantic or absurd as to expect that the magnetic pole was an object as conspicuous and mysterious as the fabled mountain of Sinbad, that it even was a mountain of iron, or a magnet as large as Mont Blanc. But Nature had here erected no monument to denote the spot which she had chosen as the centre of one of her great and dark powers; and where we could do little ourselves towards this end, it was our business to submit, and to be content in noting by mathematical numbers and signs, as with things of far more importance in the terrestrial system, what we could but ill distinguish in any other manner.... We fixed the British flag on the spot and took possession of the North Magnetic Pole and its adjoining territory in the name of Great Britain and King William the Fourth. We had abundance of materials for building, in the fragments of limestone that covered the beach; and we therefore erected a cairn of some magnitude, under which we buried a canister containing a record of the interesting fact; only regretting that we had not the means of constructing a pyramid of more importance and of strength sufficient to withstand the assaults of time and of the Eskimos. Had it been a pyramid as large as that of Cheops, I am not quite sure that it would have done more than satisfy our ambition, under the feelings of that exciting day. The latitude of this spot is 70° 5´ 17?, and its longitude 96° 46´ 45? west."

The Victory in the short summer of 1830 sailed a few miles further south and spent the winter in Victoria Harbour, to be there abandoned in May, 1832. Ross in his boats made for Fury Beach, where, at Somerset House, as he called it, he passed the following winter. On the 26th of August, 1833, when in his boats off the eastern mouth of Lancaster Sound, he was picked up by the Isabella, his old ship, and in her he reached the Humber in October of that year after four successive winters in the ice, having been enabled to make so long a stay by his fortunate find of the stores left by Parry.

In 1824 Captain Lyon was sent out in the Griper to winter at Repulse Bay, and thence crossing the isthmus described by the Eskimos continue along to Franklin's Point Turnagain; but the Griper was nearly wrecked in Rowe's Welcome and did not reach Wager River. The discoveries of Ross led to the renewal of this attempt by Captain Back in the Terror in 1836. He was to go to Wager River or Repulse Bay, and then make his way into Prince Regent Inlet, and so west; but he became imprisoned in the ice off Cape Comfort during one of the severest winters known. Drifting up Frozen Strait amid most perilous experiences, the ship, lifted high above sea-level by pressure, lay at times almost horizontal. Once "they beheld," he says, "the strange and appalling spectacle of what may be fitly termed a submerged berg, fixed low down, with one end to the ship's side, while the other, with the purchase of a long lever advantageously placed at a right angle with the keel, was slowly rising towards the surface. Meanwhile, those who happened to be below, finding everything falling, rushed or clambered on deck, where they saw the ship on her beam-ends, with the lee boats touching the water, and felt that a few moments only trembled between them and eternity."

Day after day the Terror defied the persistent effort of the ice to smash her, but suffering much in almost every timber she withstood it sufficiently to keep together. For four months she was entirely out of water, and when at last she was free, Back wrapped her up as best he could, and brought her home with the water pouring into her so that the men were so wearied out that they could hardly have continued at the pumps another day; and he ran her ashore in Lough Swilly only just in time. Upwards of twenty feet of her keel, together with ten feet of the stern-post, were driven over more than three and a half feet on one side, leaving a frightful opening astern for the free ingress of water. The forefoot was entirely gone; numbers of bolts were either loosened or broken; and when, besides this, the strained and twisted state of the ship's frame was considered, there was not one on board who did not express astonishment that they had ever floated across the Atlantic.

The next attempt to complete the coast of the American mainland was made from the land, and at the cost of the Hudson's Bay Company. Really it was the expedition proposed by Simpson some five years before, of which he would have been the leader had he not been shot; and it was entrusted to the capable hands of Dr. John Rae.

After wintering at York Factory, Rae reached Repulse Bay with two boats, the Magnet and North Pole, on the 25th of July, 1846, and in his usual style started immediately across the chain of lakes and portages which make up the isthmus that now bears his name, launching his boats in the tidal water of Committee Bay on the 1st of August. Stopped by ice on the west side and then on the east he returned to Repulse Bay, where he built Fort Hope of stones and roofed it with sails, and lived in it through the winter on what he could shoot and catch, for many weeks venturing on only one meal a day. Outside the men kept themselves warm chiefly by building snow houses and playing football; inside, as the only fuel used was for cooking, the only thing they could do was to wrap themselves in furs, and trust to their natural heat in a temperature that ranged about zero.

In April, with a couple of sledges, eight dogs, and five men, he crossed the isthmus again and went straightaway up the east side of Boothia to Ross's farthest south, thus completing that coast-line. Back he went to Fort Hope after a trip of nearly six hundred miles, to start again on the 12th of May up the west coast of the Melville Peninsula to Cape Ellice, which Parry had sighted from the strait on that side. And he was back once more at Fort Hope on the 9th of June. Thus the survey of the northern coast was complete with the exception of the gap between the Boothia isthmus, on the west side, and Castor and Pollux River of Dease and Simpson, which Rae in another famous effort from Repulse Bay was to link up later on.

When Rae reached Lord Mayor's Bay on the east coast of Boothia, Franklin, with the Erebus and Terror, was off its west coast in the same latitude. This was the reappearance of the Terror in the north. After Back's voyage she had been repaired to sail with the Erebus, under Sir James Clark Ross, when he discovered the South Magnetic Pole; and on their return the barques had been thoroughly overhauled and fitted with auxiliary screws, the first time that the screw propeller was used in Arctic work. Franklin was in the Erebus, the Terror being commanded by Francis R. M. Crozier as she had been in the Antarctic voyage. Crozier was one of Parry's men, he having been in the Fury in 1821 and in the Hecla on her two subsequent expeditions.

The ships left England on the 19th of May, 1845, and were last seen and spoken with on the 26th of July in Melville Bay on their way to Lancaster Sound. According to information gained during the long series of searches, they passed through the sound and went north for about a hundred and fifty miles, to 77°, up Wellington Channel into Penny Strait—the first time the passage had been made. Returning down the west side of Cornwallis Island, discovering the strait between it and Bathurst Island, they wintered at Beechey Island, where three of the men died and were buried; and where the most significant relic was about seven hundred tins of preserved meat that seemed to have been condemned as bad, just as the stock of similar stuff had in the same year been condemned and thrown overboard at Portsmouth.

Leaving Beechey Island in 1846, they went south down Peel Sound, being the first to pass through it, and Franklin Strait—another new discovery—to within twelve miles of Cape Felix in King William Land, where, on the 12th of September, they were beset about half-way between Cape Adelaide in Boothia and Pelly Point in Victoria Land. Hereabouts the second winter was passed, and on the 24th of May a party under Lieutenant Gore crossed the ice to Point Victory, probably on a journey to examine the unknown coast between there and Cape Herschel. On the 11th of June, 1847, Sir John Franklin died. The ships drifted a short distance during their imprisonment in the ice, and the third winter was passed some twenty miles further south down Victoria Strait, where, on the 22nd of April, 1848, when fifteen miles north-north-west of Point Victory, they were abandoned, and the officers and crews, a hundred and five in all, under Crozier's command, started for Back's Great Fish River, some of them completing the first North-West Passage in crossing Simpson Strait and reaching Montreal Island.

The first undoubted traces of the lost expedition were those discovered at Beechey Island, the news reaching England in the Prince Albert in the autumn of 1850. As soon as the winter was over this excellent little schooner was again sent out by Lady Franklin under the command of Captain William Kennedy, who took with him as a volunteer Lieutenant Joseph RenÉ Bellot of the French navy, and also John Hepburn, who had been with Franklin on the land journey in 1819. Kennedy wintered at Batty Bay in North Somerset, and during a remarkable sledge journey, in which he made the circuit of the island, he and Bellot reached Brentford Bay, and, on the 21st of April, 1852, discovered the strait named after the gallant Frenchman. But he found no traces of the expedition through turning to the north and crossing to Prince of Wales Island, instead of going to the south at the western mouth of the strait. He had, however, discovered the termination of Boothia, the north point of the American continent which men had been seeking for three centuries.

To the southern end of Boothia came the indefatigable Rae. That cheery hero of the north left Repulse Bay on the 31st of March, 1854, to complete the Hudson's Bay Company's survey. On the 20th of April he met a young Eskimo in Pelly Bay, who told him the fate of the Erebus and Terror, and from him and his people Rae obtained a number of small articles, forks and spoons and so forth, which had undoubtedly come from the ships, one of which had been crushed in the ice, the other sinking after drifting further south.

Rae was not the man to return until he had attacked the work he had set out to do, and he continued his surveying with his customary accuracy, despatch, and general alertness, striking across the peninsula, discovering the Murchison River, reaching Simpson's farthest at Castor and Pollux River, and thence proving the insularity of King William Land by travelling up the east coast of the strait now named after him—and he was back again in August. He had almost finished the survey of the northern coast-line; and he had ascertained how and where Franklin's voyage had ended, for which discovery the British Government gave him the reward of £10,000, letting it be understood that so far as they were concerned the Franklin searches were at an end.

But Lady Franklin thought one more effort should be made to unravel the mystery of her husband's fate, and there were many who thought the same. Helped to a certain extent by a public subscription, she organised another expedition. The steam-yacht Fox was bought from the executors of Sir Richard Sutton and altered for Arctic work by her builders, the Halls of Aberdeen clipper fame. As leader went Captain, afterwards Sir, Frederick Leopold M'Clintock, who had done such brilliant sledge-work in the north; like his second in command, Lieutenant W. R. Hobson, he gave his services gratuitously, as also did Dr. David Walker and Captain, afterwards Sir, Allen Young, then of the Mercantile Marine, who also subscribed £500 towards the fund. Carl Petersen, the Eskimo interpreter on the voyages of Penny and Kane, came to join from Copenhagen, having landed there from Greenland only six days previously. The British Government, although declining to send out an expedition, contributed liberally to the supplies, and sent on board all the arms and ammunition and ice-gear and every instrument that was asked for.

Lady Franklin's instructions were so characteristic of the noble-hearted woman whose name can never be forgotten in Arctic story that they must be given in full:—

"You have kindly invited me to give you 'Instructions,' but I cannot bring myself to feel that it would be right in me in any way to influence your judgment in the conduct of your noble undertaking; and indeed I have no temptation to do so, since it appears to me that your views are almost identical with those which I had independently formed before I had the advantage of being thoroughly possessed of yours. But had this been otherwise, I trust you would have found me ready to prove the implicit confidence I place in you by yielding my own views to your more enlightened judgment; knowing too as I do that your whole heart also is in the cause, even as my own is. As to the objects of the expedition and their relative importance, I am sure that you know that the rescue of any possible survivor of the Erebus and Terror would be to me, as it would be to you, the noblest result of our efforts.

"To this object I wish every other to be subordinate; and next to it in importance is the recovery of the unspeakably precious documents of the expedition, public and private, and the personal relics of my dear husband and his companions.

"And lastly, I trust it may be in your power to confirm, directly or inferentially, the claims of my husband's expedition to the earliest discovery of the passage, which, if Dr. Rae's report be true (and the Government of our country has accepted and rewarded it as such), these martyrs in a noble cause achieved at their last extremity, after five long years of labour and suffering, if not at an earlier period.

"I am sure that you will do all that man can do for the attainment of all these objects; my only fear is that you may spend yourselves too much in the effort; and you must therefore let me tell you how much dearer to me even than any of them is the preservation of the valuable lives of the little band of heroes who are your companions and followers.

"May God in His great mercy preserve you all from harm amidst the labours and perils which await you, and restore you to us in health and safety as well as honour. As to the honour I can have no misgiving. It will be yours as much if you fail (since you may fail in spite of every effort) as if you succeed; and be assured that, under any and all circumstances whatever, such is my unbounded confidence in you, you will possess and be entitled to the enduring gratitude of your sincere and attached friend,

The men of the Fox were worthy of the confidence placed in them. Leaving Aberdeen on the 1st of July, M'Clintock reached Disco on the last day of the month, and, proceeding northwards, was, by a perverse freak of fortune, beset in Melville Bay on the 8th of August, and kept imprisoned thence onwards all through the winter, drifting south through Baffin Bay and Davis Strait. On the 26th of April, 1858, after a drift of 1194 geographical miles, the Fox escaped from the pack and steamed to the eastward amid the most perilous of ice experiences. Most men would have returned and tried again; not so M'Clintock. He boldly ran up the Greenland coast as if nothing had happened and, making good deficiencies, resumed his voyage. Soon after leaving Sanderson's Hope the Fox was nearly wrecked near Buchan Island, remaining on a rock until the tide rose again to set her free. After calling at Beechey Island, M'Clintock followed Franklin's track down Peel Sound until stopped by the pack, when he retraced his course and tried Prince Regent Inlet, reaching Bellot Strait on the 21st of August. At Port Kennedy in this famous waterway—which is like a Greenland fiord, about twenty miles long and scarcely a mile wide at its narrowest part, the water four hundred feet deep within a quarter of a mile of its northern shore—he passed the winter.

On the 1st of March he reached by sledge the Magnetic Pole and fell in with four of the Boothian Eskimos, who, at the cost of a needle each, built him a snow hut in an hour, in which they all spent the night. "Perhaps," says M'Clintock, "the records of architecture do not furnish another instance of a dwelling-house so cheaply constructed!" Halting at Cape Victoria the Eskimos came up from their village close by with a number of small relics of the lost expedition. Returning to the Fox after a journey of four hundred and twenty statute miles in which the survey of the west coast of Boothia was completed, everything was made ready for three long sledge journeys of two sledges each, the captain taking that for Montreal Island, and giving Hobson the best chance of promotion by sending him round the west coast of King William Land, while Young took the Prince of Wales Land route.

On the east coast of King William Land M'Clintock met with more Eskimos, from whom he obtained relics and obtained information. Pushing on, he reached Montreal Island on the 15th of May, where the only traces of a boat were some scraps of copper and an iron-hoop bolt. A crossing to the mainland on the 18th of May revealed no more; and next day the return journey began. Six days afterwards, walking along a gravel ridge near the beach on the way to Cape Herschel, M'Clintock found the first skeleton, partly exposed, with a few fragments of clothing appearing through the snow, evidently one of the men who, as the old Eskimo woman said, fell down and died as they walked along. Visiting Simpson's cairn at Cape Herschel and meeting with nothing, he went on for about twelve miles, where he caught sight of a small cairn built by Hobson's party at their furthest south, reached six days before, containing a note with the great news that at Point Victory they had found what is now known as the Franklin record.

This record, which has frequently been printed—in a smaller size than the original—was one of the navy bottle-papers with the request in six languages that it should be forwarded to the Admiralty. A pale blue paper, twelve and a half inches by eight, it was filled up in the ordinary way, and then added to round the four margins in the handwriting of Lieutenant Gore, Captain FitzJames, and Captain Crozier, and signed by these and C. F. Des Voeux. It had been first deposited four miles away, so it said, "by the late Commander Gore," in 1847, and next year found by Lieutenant Irving, added to, and removed to the new cairn on the site of Sir James Ross's pillar.

Brief as it was, it contained all the authentic information regarding Franklin's voyage up to the time the ships were abandoned. Resuming the return journey along the edge of the strait where the meeting of the Pacific and Atlantic tides keeps the ice drifting down from the north-west almost constantly packed, M'Clintock reached a boat with two skeletons and other relics already visited by Hobson, who had found other cairns and many relics, and, in Back Bay, another record by Gore, also deposited in 1847, but giving no additional news.

Hobson was dragged alongside the Fox, on the 14th of June, so ill with scurvy that he was unable to walk or even stand without assistance. M'Clintock arrived five days later; and on the 27th Allen Young returned after an exploration of three hundred and eighty miles of coast-line, which, added to that discovered by M'Clintock and Hobson, gave a total of eight hundred geographical miles of new coast as the work of the expedition, besides what it had done in clearing up the Franklin mystery.

In 1869 Captain C. F. Hall collected other relics and sufficient information to account for seventy-nine men out of the hundred and five who left the ships. Ten years after that, Schwatka, in his long, careful search of King William Land, discovered the grave of Lieutenant Irving, in which were some fragments of his instruments and the prize medal he won at the Royal Naval College. Near by were many traces indicating that it was the site of the first encampment of the retreating crews after leaving their ships; and down the coast he traced camp after camp, and death after death. Irving's remains were brought away and are buried at Edinburgh. The spot where they were found was Cape Jane Franklin.

More fortunate than Franklin was Captain Roald Amundsen. Leaving Christiania in the GjÖa on the 16th of June, 1903, he crossed the Atlantic and proceeded down Peel Sound, past Bellot Strait, and along the west coast of Boothia, where a fire on the ship did a certain amount of damage, and, struggling thereafter for ten days among shoals and rocks, down James Ross Strait, past Matty Island into Rae Strait, he dropped anchor in Petersen Bay, King William Land. For his base station he required a site in which the inclination was eighty-nine degrees, and at GjÖahaven, in this bay, he found it in 68° 30´ N., 96° W.

Here he arranged his headquarters for his observations on the Magnetic Pole which were kept going night and day for nineteen months; and here he stayed for two winters, moving about in the country around and over into Boothia, where he proved that the Pole was not immovable and stationary, but in all likelihood in continual movement. Leaving the south-eastern corner of King William Land in his little ship he passed through Simpson Strait, linking up with Collinson; and, like him, he was delayed for a winter on the coast of the American mainland. Through Bering Strait he reached San Francisco, where the voyage ended in the sale of the GjÖa. Thus of Amundsen it can be said, without any qualification whatever, that he accomplished the North-West Passage.