r was in command.

Then came the last words, "And start to-morrow twenty-sixth for Back's
Fish River." That was all.

After a diligent search in the neighbourhood for journals or relics,
McClintock led his party along the coast, till on 30th May they found
another relic in the shape of a large boat, with a quantity of tattered
clothing lying in her. She had been evidently equipped for the ascent
of the Great Fish River. She had been built at Woolwich Dockyard; near
her lay two human skeletons, a pair of worker slippers, some watches,
guns, a _Vicar of Wakefield_, a small Bible, New Testament, and Prayer
Book, seven or eight pairs of boots, some silk handkerchiefs, towels,
soap, sponge, combs, twine, nails, shot, and cartridges, needle and
thread cases, some tea and chocolate, and a little tobacco.

Everything was carefully collected and brought back to the ship, which
was reached on 19th June. Two months later the little _Fox_ was free
from ice and McClintock reached London towards the end of September,
to make known his great discovery.

The rest of the story is well known. Most of us know the interesting
collection of Franklin relics in the United Service Institution in
London, and the monument in Waterloo Place to "the great navigator
and his brave companions who sacrificed their lives in completing the
discovery of the North-West Passage."

It was acknowledged "that to Sir John Franklin is due the priority
of discovery of the North-West Passage--that last link to forge which
he sacrificed his life."

And on the marble monument in Westminster Abbey, Tennyson, a nephew
of Sir John Franklin, wrote his well-known lines--

"Not here, the white north hath thy bones, and thou,
Heroic Sailor Soul,
Art passing on thy happier voyage now
Towards no earthly pole."

CHAPTER LXII

DAVID LIVINGSTONE

"I shall open up a path to the interior or perish."

Such were the words of one of the greatest explorers of Africa in the
nineteenth century. Determination was the keynote of his character
even as a young boy. At the age of ten he was at work in a cotton factory
in Scotland: with his first week's wages he bought a Latin grammar.
Fourteen hours of daily work left little time for reading, but he
educated himself, till at nineteen he was resolved to be a medical
missionary.

"In the glow of love which Christianity inspires, I resolved to devote
my life to the alleviation of human misery."