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 176 melancholy procession, afterwards told M'Clintock they fell down and died as they walked.

By this time considerable anxiety had been roused by the absence of any news from Franklin's party. Richardson and Rae were despatched by land in 1848, while two ships were sent on the attempt to reach Franklin through Bering Strait, and two others, the Investigator and the Enterprise, under J. C. Ross, through Baffin Bay. Rae reached the east coast of Victoria Land, and arrived within fifty miles of the spot where Franklin's two ships had been abandoned; but it was not till his second expedition by land, which started in 1853, that he obtained any news. After wintering at Lady Pelly Bay, on the 20th April, 1854, Rae met a young Eskimo, who told him that four years previously forty white men had been seen dragging a boat to the south on the west shore of King William Land, and a few months later the bodies of thirty of these men had been found by the Eskimo, who produced silver with the Franklin crest to confirm the truth of their statement. Further searches by land were continued up to as late as 1879, when Lieutenant F. Schwatka, of the United States army, discovered several of the graves and skeletons of the Franklin expedition.

Neither of the two attempts by sea from the Atlantic or from the Pacific base, in 1848, having succeeded in gaining any news, the Enterprise and the Investigator, which had previously attempted to reach Franklin from the east, were despatched in 1850, under Captain R. Collinson and Captain M'Clure, to attempt the search from the west through Bering Strait. M'Clure in the Investigator, did not wait for Collinson, as he had been