294 FATE OF FRANKLIN. 



Strait, or make for the continent, according to their 

 nearness. 



Colonel Sabine remarks, in a letter dated Woolwich, 

 5th of May, 1847 : " It was Sir John Franklin's inten- 

 tion, if foiled at one point, to try, in succession, all tho 

 probable openings into a more navigable part of the 

 Polar Sea. The range of coast is considerable in which 

 memorials of the ships' progress would have to be 

 sought for, extending from Melville Island, in the west, 

 to the great sound at the head of Baffin's Bay, in the 

 east." 



Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort, in his report to the Lords 

 Commissioners of the Admiralty, Nov. 24, 1849, ob- 

 serves : " There are four ways only in which it is likely 

 that the Erebus and Terror would have been lost- -by 

 fire, by sunken rocks, by storm, or by being crushed be- 

 tween two fields of ice. Both vessels would scarcely have 

 taken fire together ; if one of them had struck on a rock, 

 the other would have avoided the danger. Storms in 

 those narrow seas, encumbered with ice, raise no swell, 

 and could produce no such disaster; and, therefore, by 

 the fourth cause alone could the two vessels have been 

 at once destroyed ; and, even in that case, the crews 

 would have escaped upon the ice as happens every 

 year to the whalers ; they would have saved their 

 loose boats, and reached some part of the American 

 shores. As no traces of any such event have been 

 found on any part of those shores, it may, therefore, be 

 safely affirmed that one ship, at least, and both the 

 crews, are still in existence ; and, therefore, the point 

 where they now are is the great matter for consid- 

 eration. 



" Their orders would have carried them towards Mel- 

 ville Island, and then out to the westward, where it is 

 therefore probable that they are entangled amongst 



