Franklin himself, claimed by
other duties, was unable to continue his work in the Arctic, and his
appointment to the governorship of Tasmania called him for a time to
another sphere. Yet, little by little, the exploration of the Arctic
regions was carried {111} on, each explorer adding something to what
was already known, and each hoping that the honour of the discovery of
the great passage would fall to his lot. Franklin's comrade Back, now
a captain and presently to be admiral, made his way in 1834 from Canada
to the polar sea down the river that bears his name. Three years later
Simpson, in the service of the Hudson's Bay Company, succeeded in
traversing the coast from the Mackenzie to Point Barrow, completing the
missing link in the western end of the chain. John and James Ross
brought the exploration of the northern archipelago to a point that
made it certain that somewhere or other a way through must exist to
connect Baffin Bay with the coastal waters. At last the time came, in
1844, when the British Admiralty determined to make a supreme effort to
unite the explorations of twenty-five years by a final act of
discovery. The result was the last expedition of Sir John Franklin,
glorious in its disaster, and leaving behind it a tale that will never
be forgotten while the annals of the British nation remain.

{112}

CHAPTER V

THE TRAGEDY OF FRANKLIN'S FATE

The month of May 1845 found two stout ships, the _Erebus_ and the
_Terror_, riding at anchor in the Thames. Both ships were already well
known to the British public. They had but recently returned from the
Antarctic seas, where Captain Sir James Ross, in a voyage towards the
South Pole, had attained the highest southern latitude yet reached.
Both were fine square-rigged ships, strengthened in every way that the
shipwrights of the time could devise. Between their decks a warming
and ventilating apparatus of the newest kind had been installed, and,
as a greater novelty still, the attempt was now made for the first time
in history to call in the power of steam for the fight against the
Arctic frost. Each vessel carried an auxiliary screw and an engine of
twenty horse-power. When we remember that a modern steam vessel with a
horse-power of many thousands is still {113} powerless against the
northern ice, the _Erebus_ and the _Terror_ arouse in us a forlorn
pathos. But in the springtime of 1845 as they lay in the Thames, an
object of eager inte