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 time commissioned by Captain Crozier [see ].

The two ships, fitted, for the first time in the annals of Arctic exploration, with auxiliary screws, and provisioned (as it was believed) for three years, sailed together from Greenhithe on 18 May, with instructions to make their way to about 74° N., 98° W., in the vicinity of Cape Walker, and thence to the southward and westward in a course as direct to Behring's Straits as ice and land might permit. ‘It was well known,’ wrote Sherard Osborn in 1859, ‘that this southern course was that of Franklin's predilection, founded on his judgment and experience. There are many in England who can recollect him pointing on his chart to the western entrance of Simpson Strait and the adjoining coast of North America and saying, “If I can but get down there, my work is done; thence it's plain sailing to the westward.”’ In the beginning of July the ships were at Disco, and Fitzjames, the commander of the Erebus, wrote on the 12th ‘that Sir John was delightful;’ that both officers and men were in good spirits and of excellent material (, p. 286). On 26 July the ships parted from an Aberdeen whaler off the entrance of Lancaster Sound; a fair wind bore them away westward, and they vanished into the unknown. Over their movements a dark curtain settled down, which was raised slowly and with difficulty, nor was it fully lifted for fourteen years.

As early as the winter of 1846–7 there were gloomy anticipations; and though it was maintained at the admiralty that, as the ships were provisioned for three years, there were no grounds for anxiety, popular feeling so far prevailed that in the summer of 1847 large supplies, under the charge of Sir John Richardson and Dr. Rae, were sent out to Hudson's Bay to be conveyed by the inland water route to the mouth of the Mackenzie or of the Coppermine, or to other stations on the coast. As the winter of 1847–8 passed by without any news of the ships, a very real uneasiness was felt. With the spring of 1848 began a series of relief and search expeditions, both public and private, English and American, which has no parallel in maritime annals, and which, while prosecuting the main object of the voyages, turned the map of the Arctic regions north of America from a blank void into a grim but distinct representation of islands, straits, and seas. These expeditions, of which a complete list is given by Richardson (Polar Regions, p. 172), may be summarised thus: One in 1847, that already mentioned from Hudson's Bay under Richardson and Rae; five in 1848; three in 1849; ten in 1850, including those sent out by the admiralty under Austin, Ommanney, Collinson, and McClure; two in 1851; nine in 1852, including the one under Sir Edward Belcher; five in 1853, including one in boats and sledges by Dr. Rae, and one into Smith's Sound by Dr. Kane of the United States Navy; two in 1854; one in 1855; and one, that of the Fox, in 1857.

In 1850 Captain Ommanney discovered on Beechey Island the traces of the missing ships having there passed their first winter, and at the same time vast stacks of preserved meat canisters, which, there was only too much reason to believe, had been found to be filled with putrid abomination, and had been there condemned by survey, thus fatally diminishing the three years' provisions which were supposed to be on board (ib. p. 163). Nothing further was learned till April 1854, when Dr. Rae, a factor of the Hudson's Bay Company, in a boat expedition carried on at the company's expense, gathered intelligence of a party of white men having been seen, four winters before, travelling over the ice near King William's Land, and of their bodies having been afterwards seen on the main land in the neighbourhood of a large river, presumably Back's Great Fish River. From the Eskimos who told him of this, Rae also obtained numerous small articles, silver spoons, &c., the marks on which clearly identified them as having belonged to officers of the Erebus and Terror; among others a small silver plate engraved ‘Sir John Franklin, K.C.H.’ (Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, 13 Nov. 1854, xxv. 250).

By these visible tokens the substantial truth of the story seemed to be fully confirmed, and the admiralty declined to enter on any further search. Others, however, were fain to hope that some survivors might still remain, and, chiefly by the personal exertions and at the personal cost of Lady Franklin, the Fox yacht was fitted out in 1857, under the command of Captain (now Admiral Sir) Leopold McClintock. She failed through the accident of the seasons to get into the prescribed locality in the first or second year. It was not till the early months of 1859 that McClintock and his colleagues, Lieutenant Hobson of the navy, and Captain (now Sir) Allen Young of the mercantile marine, came on distinct traces of the lost expedition. Numerous relics were then found: a boat, a few skeletons, chronometers, clothing, instruments, watches, plate, books; and at last, towards the end of May, a written paper, the contents of which, together with what was told by the Eskimos or could be argued by