all the honors
and applause with which they have invariably crowned every explorer
returning from the north with even a measure of success. In originality
of plan and equipment Parry has been equaled and surpassed only by
Nansen and Peary.

In those early days, few men being rich enough to pay for expeditions to
the north out of their own pockets, practically every explorer was
financed by the government under whose orders he acted. In 1829,
however, Felix Booth, sheriff of London, gave Captain John Ross, an
English naval officer, who had achieved only moderate success in a
previous expedition, a small paddle-wheel steamer, the _Victory_, and
entered him in the race for the Northwest Passage. Ross was assisted, as
mate, by his nephew, James Clark Ross, who was young and energetic, and
who was later to win laurels at the opposite end of the globe. This
first attempt to use steam for ice navigation failed, owing to a poor
engine or incompetent engineers, but in all other respects the Rosses
achieved gloriously. During their five years' absence, 1829-1834, they
made important discoveries around Boothia Felix, but most valuable was
their definite location of the magnetic North Pole and the remarkable
series of magnetic and meteorological observations which they brought
back with them.

No band of men ever set out for the unknown with brighter hopes or more
just anticipation of success than Sir John Franklin's expedition of
1845. The frightful tragedy which overwhelmed them, together with the
mystery of their disappearance, which baffled the world for years and is
not yet entirely explained, forms the most terrible narrative in arctic
history. Franklin had been knighted in 1827, at the same time as Parry,
for the valuable and very extensive explorations which he had conducted
by snowshoes and canoe on the North American coast between the
Coppermine and Great Fish rivers, during the same years that Parry had
been gaining fame in the north. In the interval Franklin had served as
Governor of Tasmania for seven years. His 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