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 th