al financial profit, their persistent invasion by man. It is estimated
by competent statisticians, that in the last two centuries no less than
two thousand million dollars' worth of furs, fish, whale-oil, whalebone,
and minerals, have been taken out of the ice-bound seas.

[Illustration: "THEY FELL DOWN AND DIED AS THEY WALKED"]

The full story--at once sorrowful and stimulating--of Arctic exploration,
can not be told here. That would require volumes rather than a single
chapter. Even the part played in it by Americans can be sketched in
outline only. But it is worth remembering that the systematic attack of
our countrymen upon the Arctic fortress, began with an unselfish and
humane incentive. In 1845 Sir John Franklin, a gallant English seaman, had
set sail with two stout ships and 125 men, to seek the Northwest Passage.
Thereafter no word was heard from him, until, years later, a searching
party found a cairn of stones on a desolate, ice-bound headland, and in it
a faintly written record, which told of the death of Sir John and
twenty-four of his associates. We know now, that all who set out on this
ill-fated expedition, perished. Struggling to the southward after
abandoning their ships, they fell one by one, and their lives ebbed away
on the cruel ice. "They fell down and died as they walked," said an old
Esquimau woman to Lieutenant McClintock, of the British navy, who sought
for tidings of them, and, indeed, her report found sorrowful verification
in the skeletons discovered years afterward, lying face downward in the
snow. To the last man they died. Think of the state of that last
man--alone in the frozen wilderness! An eloquent writer, the correspondent
McGahan, himself no stranger to Arctic pains and perils, has imagined that
pitiful picture thus:

"One sees this man after the death of his last remaining companion, all
alone in that terrible world, gazing round him in mute despair, the sole,
living thing in that dark frozen universe. The sky is somber, the earth
whitened with a glittering whiteness that chills the heart. His clothing
is covered with frozen snow, his face lean and haggard, his beard a
cluster of icicles. The setting sun looks back to see the last victim die.
He meets her sinister gaze with a steady eye, as though bidding her
defiance. For a few minutes they glare at each other, then the curtain is
drawn, and all is dark."

As fears for Franklin's safety deepened into certainty of his loss with