THE LAST OF THE ARGONAUTS. T HE death of Dr. John
Rae, at -the great age of eighty- three, wakes an echo from a region and a time which, after the lapse of forty years, are still crowded with the memories of great purposes and high romance. It was Dr. Rae, himself an intrepid and successful explorer of the Arctic Coast, who, in 1854, obtained the first clue to the fate of Sir John Franklin's Expedition, which had sailed to discover the North-West Passage nine years before, and had then vanished for ever from the sight of civilised man. " Not sixty, my lord, only fifty-nine," was Franklin's answer to the First Lord of the Admiralty, who demurred, on the grounds of his long service, to his request for the command of the Erebus' and Terror,' then fitting-out for the final effort to find the Arctic road to the China seas. He claimed the ap- pointment by right, as senior officer of those who had explored the frozen ocean ; and the claim could not be denied. The record of his exploits begins so early, and the story of his en- terprise rises with such force and with such measured cer- tainty to the final catastrophe, to the cause won, and the life lost, that it needed not the long mystery surrounding his death to keep his memory fresh. Dates only bewilder in such a case. We can hardly believe that the man whose fate was a fourteen years' mystery to the modern world, the poor relics of whose wanderings attracted sympa- thising crowds at the Naval Exhibition of 1891, fought with . the Danes at the Battle of the Baltic, and with the French at Trafalgar, tried to reach the Pole in 1818 in the Trent,' and made his first exploration of the northern coast of America in 1819. From that date to his appointment to command the expedition in search of the North-West Passage in 1845, Franklin seems to have been unable to resist the attraction which the exploration of this particular region had for his imagination. In various journeys by land and sea, Franklin, Dr. Rae, Dease, Simpson, and other explorers crept from river to river and from headland to headland, returning like seafowl to the North each summer, and retreating or hibernating in huts during the long winters, until the secret of the frozen rim of the New World, from Hudson Bay to the Coppermine River, from the Coppermine to the Mackenzie, and from thence along-the north of the great western horn of North America to Behring Strait, was fairly won. Franklin, genial and successful as a sea- captain, was less fortunate in his sledge-journeys ; and where Rae, with his Scotch canniness and knowledge of the country gained in his employment as doctor in the Hudson Bay Com- pany's service, achieved his discoveries with no loss of life and at small cost, Franklin's parties sometimes suffered the utmost extremity of misery. We may contrast the history of the expe- dition made by Franklin beyond the Coppermine River, a dis- tance of some 5,500 miles, with that undertaken later by Rae in his search for Franklin himself, inlwhich the distance travelled was almost identical. The former expedition endured suffer- ings almost without parallel in Arctic story. Some died ; some were murdered ; and one was executed as the murderer. Franklin's expedition took two years. Rae travelled an equal distance in eight months, with no severe hardship and no loss of life. But Rae was a " lucky " explorer, though it is diffi- cult to distinguish between the spontaneous gifts of chance and the ready promptitude which turned them to account. In conversation, Dr. Rae was fond of alluding to a lucky " incident, to which we should be inclined to give a different name. His men were ill with scurvy, and he had set out on a hopeless quest for some vegetable food. He noticed, in the print left by his snow-shoe, a blood-red mark on the white surface. He instantly' knelt downto:ascertain the cause, and found that the stain came from a crushed cranberry which lay beneath the snow. A little lower down he found a whole bed of cranberries, covered by the snow-drift, and preserved in this natural freezing-chamber. He gathered the fresh fruit, and carried it back to his sick men, and the store so• discovered lasted until they all recovered.
But suffering and privation seem only to whet the appetite- for Arctic discovery. One idea remained fixed and clear in Franklin's mind as the result of the completed map of the- true north coast of America. With a few unimportant devia- tions, that coast-line runs almost exactly parallel with the line of the seventieth degree of latitude, until it is broken by the• great peninsulas of Boothia and Baffin Land, which rum directly northwards parallel with Davie's Strait and the Gulf of Boothia. The last is a cud-de-sac. But Franklin• knew that if he could find a way by which he could, after sailing north of the Boothian peninsula, double back to• the known coast-line of the continent, the passage to• the west was clear before him, did weather and ice permit, and the problem of the North-West Passage would be solved,. if not for commerce, then for knowledge. This is what Sir- John Franklin succeeded in doing ; and though neither he- nor any of his company lived to tell the story, and the un- grudging efforts of a nation failed to discover the place or- manner of his death, the love of the sailor's wife prevailed where the practical sympathy of nations effected nothing. It was by the efforts of Lady Franklin, and of English. officers and sailors fired by her devotion and united in what seemed a hopeless quest by the purest feelings of chivalry and honour, that the fate of the expedition was definitely ascertained, and the claim of its leader vindicate& to the fame which was his due. To discover the one,- and to establish the other, twenty thousand miles of un- known Polar coasts were explored, fortunes were lavished,. ships lost, lives cheerfully sacrificed, fresh volunteers always• forthcoming, and public sympathy never exhausted. The- length of time for which this public interest in the fate of Sir John and his men was sustained, is perhaps the most: creditable feature of the strange story of the Franklin Search. That a loyal and devoted wife should never lack supporters in her prolonged quest is less surprising than the unflinching determination which for years animated the people of England to send expeditions by land and sea to find the missing crews. To continue the Franklin Search became part of the national conscience. The Erebus and Terror ' had disappeared as completely as if they had sailed into another world, after they were last seen, sailing north in Baffin Bay in July, 1845. In 1848, public anxiety was thoroughly awakened. Between that date and 1854, when Dr. Rae saw and heard evidence of the total loss of the explorers, no less than fifteen expeditions were sent out by land and sea, The whole archipelago beyond the mainland of North America was pervaded by wandering ships. seeking for the lost. The would-be rescuers incurred endlerA. perils and hardships. Between the years 1852 and 1854, no than thirteen vessels were exploring, and five of these were abandoned in the ice-pack. All eyes were turned to the- extreme North, following the progress of the Franklin Search,. and the contour of the forbidden and forbidding land soon. became familiar to the public. M'Clure was ice-bound for- three years on Melville Island, and when rescued by M.'Clintoek, had to abandon his three ships, together with that which carried his rescuer. One deserted vessel, the• Resolute,' was floated in the drift-ice into open water, ware picked-up by an American whaler, carried into an American port, purchased of her salvors by the United States Govern- ment, and sent over to Portsmouth, fully equipped, as a gift from America for the further prosecution of the search.
In 1854, Dr. Rae, in the course of his five thousand miles- of journey on sledges along the continental shore for which he suspected that Franklin would make after rounding the -northern promontories, found the first convincing proof of the loss of the whole party. Information has been obtained, and articles purchased, from the natives," he wrote, "which prove beyond a doubt that a portion, if not all, of the sur- vivors of the long-lost and unfortunate party under Sir John Franklin have met with a fate as dreadful and as melancholy as it is possible to imagine." A few tracks of snow-grouse and foxes were all the signs of life in the desolate region to which the explorers had penetrated ; but some wandering Esquimaux declared that they had seen the last survivors dropping down dead, one by one, as they pulled their sledges, and that the dead bodies of the last of the expedition had been found, lying in their huts or on the snow, near the mouth of the great Fish River. Portions of guns, spoons, forks, and a medal, and silver plate with the crest of Sir John Franklin were purchased by Rae, and sent home as evidence of the truth of the Esquimaux story. The English Government were at last satisfied that the whole expedition had long perished beyond hope of rescue. But Lady Franklin, with a loyalty to her husband's memory not excelled in the records of woman's fidelity, would not abandon the search. There was no further hope of finding her husband living ; but his claim to have discovered the North-West Passage might yet be vindicated. In a letter to Lord Palmerston, she declared her intention to sacrifice, if necessary, her entire available fortune for that purpose. The Fox,' fitted out by Lady Franklin, and commanded by Sir Leopold M'Clintook, again sought the Arctic Sea ; and at last, in 1859, found an authentic record of the discovery of the North-West Passage. The rust-stained document, found in a cairn off Cape Herschell, showed that for twelve months all bad gone well, and the party were within ninety miles of the known sea fringing the coast of North America. A month later Sir John Franklin had died, the ships were ice-bound, and in the following spring, the whole of the survivors had set out on the terrible journey back to Hudson's Bay, which none were fated to reach. Many relics of the last stages of the march were picked up by the explorers, until the discovery of the bones of the last survivors scattered round their huts confirmed the melancholy conclusion drawn by Rae in 1854.
The early success of a few able and determined men, guided by one thoroughly conversant with the conditions of Arctic research, is perhaps a favourable augury for the fortunes of the little band who are linked with Dr. Nansen in his latest enterprise of drifting to the Pole.
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