ON THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE. XI 



sliip having been seen off King William's Island, which drifted ashore 

 in the autumn of the same year 1848; and that many of the 

 white men dropped by the way, as they went toward the Great 

 River. Continuing his search, he found, on the 24th of May, about 

 ten miles eastward of Cape Herschel, on King William's Island, a 

 bleached skeleton, around which lay some fragments of European 

 clothing. ' Judging from his dress,' adds Capt. McClintock, ' this 

 unfortunate vo 11115 man was a steward or officer's servant, and his 



f O 



position exactly verified the Esquimaux's assertion, that they dropped 

 as they walked along.' Lieutenant Hobson was even more fortunate 

 than his commander. After parting from him, he made for Cape 

 Felix, the northern extremity of King William's Island, where he 

 found a cairn, about which were relics of a shooting or magnetic 

 station, and among them a boat's ensign. A few miles to the south- 

 ward, upon Point Victory, he came upon another cairn, where a vast 

 quantity of clothing and stores lay strewed about, as if here every 

 article was thrown away which could possibly be dispensed with ; 

 pickaxes, shovels, boats, cooking utensils, ironwork, rope, blocks, can- 

 vas, a dip circle, a sextant, engraved ' Frederic Hornby, R. K.,' a 

 small medicine-chest, oars, etc. But among them, and more interes- 

 ting and precious than all, was a record, dated April 25th, 1848, from 

 which, and from a duplicate found soon after, they learned that the 

 Erebus and Terror passed their first winter at Beachy Island, after 

 having ascended the Wellington Channel to lat. 77 deg. N., and 

 returned by the west side of Cornwallis Island. When the spring 

 opened, the hardy mariners struggled southward, making for King 

 William's Island, hoping to reach beyond it the continent of America, 

 and thus open the long-sought-for North- West Passage. Their efforts 

 were, however, in vain. The ice-fields which flow down between 

 Melville Island and Bank's Island, and block up the narrows about 

 King William's Island, caught them on the 12th of September, 1846, 

 in lat, 70 5' N., and long. 98 23' W. From this position the ships 

 never escaped, except to drift a few miles further southwards. Here, 

 also, on the llth of June, 1847, Sir John Franklin died not, we may 

 hope, of starvation, or with any fearful foresight of the fate that was to 

 befall his companions, but quietly and peacefully worn out with 

 arduous labor, yet full of hope that his task was about to be accom- 

 plished, and with the cherished and consoling conviction that they 

 who bore his last words to those he loved at home, would carry, also, 

 the news of that success to the very brink of which he had led them. 

 On the 22d of April, 1848, after another season of dreary waiting 

 and suffering, which will never be told, the remainder of the officers 

 and crew, one hundred and five in number, under the command of 

 Capt. Crozier, abandoned their ships, five leagues N. N. West of Point 

 Victory, on King William's Island, and started for the Great Fish River. 

 The total loss by deaths in the expedition, up to this date, was nine 



