it were on their faces, all still in the attitudes in which Death bent over them when he touched them with his 'mace petrific,' and nothing to tell how the expedition approached the termination of its sufferings but a few tremulous entries in the Captain's journal, written in a character which the poor awe-struck barbarians could not decipher.

Preparations for the retreat had accordingly been in progress for several months. Thirteen hundred miles must be traversed before the navigators could reach the outskirts of civilization and consider themselves in safety. Part of the distance would lie over the ice, for which sledges were necessary, and part through the water, for which boats must be dragged across the intervening floes. Four of the troop were crippled men who must be drawn along inch by inch by their healthier companions. The provisions and clothing for such a journey were a fearful incumbrance, seeing that their only baggage animals were six enfeebled dogs, and that the explorers themselves must serve as the principal beasts of draught. Yet the Commander did not permit himself to be discouraged. Two whaleboats, twenty-four to twenty-six feet in length, were mounted upon sledges and covered with a canvas tent or housing. A third but lesser boat was also secured upon runners, and a fourth sledge was taken as a sort of flying vehicle, to be drawn by the dogs and employed in transporting stores or invalids as occasion might require. Provisions, consisting chiefly of pulverized biscuit and melted fat or tallow, together with concentrated bean soup, coffee and tea-the latter the grand viaticum of Arctic adventurers-were stowed away in bags coated with tar and pitch to keep them water-tight. Special cooking utensils were contrived by the honorary tinker to the expedition, and canvas mocassins, carpet boots, and other articles of dress were manufactured, each person ministering to himself in the tailoring department.

The first homeward step was to transport the sick to the Esquimaux hut at Anoatok. With great wisdom the Captain had resolved to use this place as a kind of depôt, not only for stores, but for invalids. Instead of launching the whole party at once, retarded as they must have been with their ailing comrades, Dr. Kane kept plying for several weeks between the vessel and Anoatok in his brave little dog-sledge, sometimes taking down a patient, sometimes a cargo of provender, and as the distance was about thirty-five miles, not less than eleven hundred miles were thus traversed by him in executing the mere preliminaries of the retreat.

At last, however, the party made their formal Exodus from the brig. Sorrowfully, indeed, as we may guess, for where is the

Abandonment of the Ship.

347

dungeon which has not endeared itself in some respects to the captive who has pined in it for numerous years? Prayers being read, and an address delivered by the Commander, the men yoked themselves to the boat-sledges, and set out, some with gutta-percha masks on their faces, and others with pieces of wood having a slit in the centre fitted to their eyes, these being the native substitutes for spectacles, and the best Esquimaux preservative against snow-blindness. Slow was the pace at which they proceeded. At the expiration of eight days the feeble caravan had toiled over an interval of not more than fifteen miles. Never, in fact, during their painful march over the ice, did the rate of advance exceed three and a half miles per diem, though the actual movement might be equivalent to four times. that distance. Nor was it particularly expeditious when the eighty-one miles of unbroken floe had been trodden and the water was reached. The sea was so much littered with fragments that it took them sixteen days to effect an advance of one hundred miles.

Our average progress was then about eight miles a day, stopping for our hunting parties and for sleep. Great care was taken not to infringe upon the daily routine. We had perpetual daylight; but it was my rule, rarely broken even by extreme necessity, not to enter upon the labours of a day until we were fully refreshed from those of the day before. We halted regularly at bed-time and for meals. The boats, if afloat, were drawn up; the oars always disposed on the ice as a platform for the stores; our buffalo skins were spread, each man placed himself with his pack according to his number, the cook for the day made his fire, and the ration, however scanty, was formally measured out. Prayers were never intermitted. I believe firmly that to these well-sustained observances we are largely indebted for our final escape.'

What hardships and accidents the party encountered it would be a lengthy task to relate. Sometimes a sledge broke through the ice, or a boat was nearly sunk; sometimes it was necessary to cut a path through the hummocks, or to shovel a way through the deep snow-drift, as if preparing a real Great Northern Railroad; now they were arrested by a storm, or lost in a fog; and then the floe broke up suddenly, tossing the ice into hills with a hideous clamour, and whirling the boats on the top of a seething caldron, like chips in a maelström. Occasionally their fuel ran so scarce that they burnt into their conveyances; and once their provisions were reduced to so low an ebb, that they must have famished but for the capture of a seal-an operation which almost paralyzed the men with anxiety, and elicited a ravenous yell of delight when accomplished. Frequently, too, their strength

seemed about to fail them completely; their feet were so distended that they had to cut open their canvas boots; they drew their breath with increasing difficulty; they could scarcely sleep, wearied as they were; and on one occasion the united strength of the party could hardly suffice to drag a single boat over a small tongue of ice. But at length, after eighty-four days of toil and exposure, all spent in the open air, these weather-beaten mariners arrived at Upernavik on the 6th August, 1855. A small oil-boat from this Danish settlement gave them the first oppor'tunity of communicating with the world, from which they had been so long estranged. Its occupant poured out a stream of intelligence as new and unintelligible to them as if he had dropped down from some far-off planet. Sebastopol aint taken,' said he. 'Where and what was Sebastopol ?' exclaimed the explorers.

At Disco, they fell in with a vessel which the United States' Government had despatched to search for the searchers; and when the Captain (Hartstene) learnt that the 'little man in a ragged flannel shirt' was the long-lost Dr. Kane, his crew instantly manned the rigging, and a hearty burst of cheers wound up, with a fit finale, one of the most hazardous and heroic enterprises ever accomplished on this globe.

The task so gallantly achieved has been as worthily recorded. A more interesting narrative of Arctic research than Dr. Kane's does not exist. Compared with some of the dull journals it has been our lot to read, and especially with that pompous but flatulent production entitled the Last of the Arctic Voyages, the present work is as superior as a sea tale by Marryat to a merchantman's log. It is illustrated with several hundred engravings, so that the pencil of the author has liberally aided his graphic pen; and with two such able implements at work for the reader's benefit, he must be fastidious indeed who does not yield to the fascinations of the book, or who permits his attention to grow cold before the last chapter is completed. We have noticed several little discrepancies, perhaps the consequence of hasty preparation; but when a writer gives us such a delightful narrative, couched in so modest a strain, we can only thank him for his magnificent volumes, and, still more, for the noble addition which he and his comrades have made to the world's stock of valiant and memorable exploits.

A few words respecting the results of this expedition. First, it is needless to say that, with regard to the ill-starred men whose fate they hoped to elucidate, the adventurers returned as they went, without detecting a single trace, or acquiring a single particle of information. The melancholy memorials discovered at

Can Franklin be Alive?

349

Beechey Island by Captain Penny's officers, and the still more expressive relics procured by Dr. Rae, in Pelly Bay, prove that the generous exertions of the Americans were wasted on a shore and in a quarter which Franklin never attempted to reach.

Secondly, there are men of high standing and experience who still believe that some members of that hapless squadron may yet exist. Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort, in a letter addressed to Lieutenant Bedford Pim, remarks that he must be a very in'credulous person who doubts that, at this moment (Dec. 1856), 'several of our abandoned and almost forgotten countrymen are sheltering themselves in snow-huts, swallowing morsels of frozen seal or walrus, and, at the same time, chewing the bitter cud of their country's want of gratitude, want of faith, and want of 'honour.'* Would that there were any good reason for participating in this view! Share it we cannot. Nearly twelve years of absence are sufficient to freeze every hope of Franklin's return. Too plain a dilemma stares us in the face to permit any indulgence in such benevolent credulity. If the wanderers are living, what could have locked them up for so long a time in these regions of ice, and prevented their return to the South ?or if, on the other hand, their circumstances were such as absolutely to interdict their escape, must they not also have been such as to extinguish life before a dozen winters could elapse? But Dr. Kane's narrative seems to us to negative the idea that a band of Europeans could weather more than a few of the long dreary Arctic nights, even with Esquimaux resources at their command. Not that he expresses any opinion to this effect-his leaning is perhaps quite in the contrary direction. But it is perfectly clear from his pages that a third winter in Rensellaer Harbour would have been fatal to many of his own crew, and in all probability would have swept the dormitory of the Advance with the 'besom of destruction. There were periods, as we have seen, when the illness of a single man, or the absence of food for another day, might have decided the fate of the whole party, trembling as the balance frequently was, between life and death, and tilted only by some providential event. It is true that the American was imprisoned in a much more northerly position than that in which the Englishman was probably arrested, but still it was in a latitude haunted by Esquimaux; and, as it is ever urged, that where natives exist, Europeans may manage to live, the experience of this expedition is as available as if the vessel had been shut up in the ice in Peel Sound, or in the neighbourhood of King William's Land. Now it is stated by Dr. Kane, that the * See Lieutenant Bedford Pim's Earnest Appeal, p. 18.

inhabitants of the coast are a perishing race. They themselves appear to be unable to cope with the climate. They know that they are hastening to extinction, 'dying out, not lingeringly, like the American tribes, but so rapidly as to be able to mark, within a generation, their progress' towards extirpation. In fact, as we have seen, the nearest little colony to the brig was probably preserved from death in 1855 by the opportune arrival of Hans and his fowling-piece. And to what but a contraction of the breed, a shrivelling up of the inhabitants, can we ascribe many of the deserted huts which spot the shores wherever the Arctic voyager has proceeded? But there is another grave objection to the argument derived from native powers of endurance. Franklin and his associates were not Esquimaux: they were not born in snow huts, cradled in ice, nursed on blubber, brought up on walrus' flesh, and exposed from infancy to the fierce frosts and biting temperatures of the Polar Circle. English constitutions will brave much, but they could not be expected, under circumstances of hardship, and when enfeebled by excessive toil, to support the rigours of a climate under which the idle and insouciant barbarians are themselves decaying. The effect of a northern imprisonment on Europeans is not simply to sap the bodily strength, but it has a strange tendency to produce mental prostration. The state in which the crew of the Investigator was found after their long confinement in Mercy Bay, is too recent and too striking a case to be forgotten. Well might Dr. Kane exclaim, even during the first winter in Rensellaer harbour, 'As I look round upon the pale faces and haggard looks of my 'comrades, I feel that we are fighting the battle of life at disadvantage, and that an Arctic night and an Arctic day age a man more rapidly and harshly than a year anywhere else in all this "weary world.'

The geographical results of Dr. Kane's expedition, however, are of considerable interest. Foremost is the discovery of the Great Glacier of Humboldt, the most stupendous frost-work of the species on which the eye of man has ever rested. Had there been no other fruit from his adventures, we doubt not that he would have considered himself well repaid for his exertions by the sight of this giant production of the ice-world, crawling like a serpent across the land, and exhibiting the undulations of hill and valley by the archings and inflexions of its form-ploughing up the ground on either hand into huge wrinkles, and furrowing the rocks beneath with the points of its mail-its head dipping into the sea as if the thirsty reptile had come down from its lair to drain the great basin at a draught-the flakes of foam from its jaws, and the scales from its neck floating off on the recoiling