or ducks, went indiscriminately into the pot. We rejoiced whenever we got a fresh mess of any sort.
The summer burst upon us; water was pouring down all the ravines, and flooding the ice in the harbour, and with extreme satisfaction we saw the snow houses and ice hummocks fast melting away in the now never-setting sun. A joyous feeling existed throughout the ship, for our work was done, and we had only to look forward to an early release, and a return to our families and homes.
Over and over again we told our adventures, and we never tired of listening to the one all-absorbing, though melancholy subject, of the discovery of the fate of Sir John Franklin and his companions.
We had been prepared by the report brought from the Esquimaux in February to find that all hopes of survivors were at an end, and that the expedition had met with some fatal and overwhelming casualty; but we were scarcely prepared to know, nor could we even have realized the manner, in which they spent their last days upon earth, so fearful a sojourn must it have been. Beset and surrounded with wastes of snow and ice, they passed two more terrible winters drifting slowly to the southward at the rate of one mile in the month, hoping each summer that the ice would open, and determined not to abandon their ships until every hope was gone. In nineteen months they had only moved some eighteen miles, their provisions daily lessening, and their strength fast failing. They had at last left their ships for the Fish River at least two months before the river could break up and allow them to proceed, and in the then imperfect knowledge of ice travelling they could not have carried with them more than forty days' provisions. Exhausted by scurvy and starvation, "they dropped as they walked along,"[1] and those few who reached Montreal Island must all have perished there; and but for their having travelled over the frozen sea we should have found the remains of these gallant men as they fell by the way, and but for the land being covered deeply with snow, more relics of those who had struggled to the beach to die would have been seen. They all perished, and, in dying in the cause of their country, their dearest consolation must have been to feel that Englishmen would not rest until they had followed up their footsteps, and had given to the world what they could not then give—the grand result of their dreadful voyage—their Discovery of the North-West Passage. They had sailed down Peel and Victoria Straits, now appropriately named Franklin Straits, and the poor human skeletons lying upon the shores of the waters in which Dease and Simpson had sailed from the westward bore melancholy evidence of their success.
By the middle of July the dark blue stream rolled again through Bellot Straits, but yet not a drop of water could be seen in Regent Inlet. Our ship was refitted, the stores all on board, and we were quite prepared for sea. Our engineers were both lost to us, but the Captain soon got
- ↑ Esquimaux report.
