forty white men were seen early one spring, dragging a boat and sledges south upon, or near, King William’s Land. The men were thin, and supposed to be getting short of provisions; the party was led by a stout middle-aged man. Later in the season, after the arrival of the wild fowl (May), but before the ice broke up, the bodies of thirty persons, and some graves, were discovered on the continent, and five other corpses on an island; some of these bodies were in a tent, others under the boat which had been turned over to afford shelter. Of those corpses seen on the island, one was supposed to be a chief; he had a telescope over his shoulders, and a double-barrelled gun beneath him. The native description of the locality where this sad scene was discovered agreed exactly with Montreal Island and Point Ogle, at the entrance of the Great Fish River; and knowing what we now do of the position of the ships, the date of abandonment, and taking all circumstances into consideration, it is now vain to suppose that any survivors exist of the crews of the Erebus and Terror; nor is it likely that records of their voyage will now be found, as we may be assured that no Christian officers or men, would for one moment think of dragging logs, books, or journals with them when they were obliged to abandon their dying comrades on King William’s Land: and, indeed, when it is remembered that they neither cached journals or books of any description at Cape Victory, or the deserted boat, it is not probable that any were ever taken out of the vessels at a juncture when the sole object must have been to save life — and life only.
We shall soon learn, from the publication of Captain M’Clintock’s journals, how a woman’s devoted love, and a generous nation’s sympathy, at last cleared up the mystery which once hung over the voyage of her Majesty’s ships Erebus and Terror, and secured to Franklin and his followers the honour for which they died — that of being the First Discoverers of the North-West Passage.
ROBERT STEPHENSON.
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Birth-place of Robert Stephenson.
Before these pages will be in the hands of our readers a grave in Westminster Abbey will have opened and closed over the remains of Robert Stephenson. He too is gone —so soon after Brunei, that we conceive of the Angel of Death, our fancy playing with his terrors, as commissioned to remove the Chiefs of the engineering world. Both were the eminent sons of illustrious fathers, -who died, like those sons, at no long interval from each other. But it was the lot of Robert Stephenson to stand as it were in the shadow of a parent greater than himself in some respects: greater in the bound he made from lowliness to fame by a single conception and by herculean energy, but not greater in the largeness of his heart or understanding, or more deservedly honoured and beloved by the world.
Robert Stephenson was a great man, if we try him by his works and look only to the material tests of his professional eminence. If George Stephenson was the parent of the locomotive engine, Robert may be justly styled the parent of the railway system as it exists among us. He was the engineer of the London and Birmingham (now London and North-Western) railway, the first long line that was opened between the metropolis and the distant provinces: and, if the name of Brunei will be for ever associated with that of the Great Western on land, and the Great
Eastern on the waters, the name of Robert