396 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [Vov. VIII. 
of the ships had been crushed in the ice, while the other one drifted 
southward through Victoria Strait to a place called Oot-loo-lik, in the 
vicinity of Grant Point or O’Rielly Island, where it sank or was 
wrecked. The wreck was visited by these natives in the winter of 
1857-8. - 
When Sir John Franklin and his companions did not return in 
18,7 many searching parties were sent to look for them both by land 
and sea, but nothing could be learned of the course which they had 
followed or of their fate until, in 1854, Dr. John Rae, while exploring 
the isthmus of Boothia Felix, was informed by Eskimos that a great 
number of white men had perished of starvation on or near King 
William Island, off the north of the Great Fish River. Unfortunately 
he erroneously located the place where the last survivors were said to 
have reached as at Montreal Island, in the bay at the mouth of this 
river. 
On the receipt of this information Sir George Simpson, the 
governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, instructed Messrs. James 
Anderson and J. G. Stewart, two officers of the Company, to start from 
Fort Resolution on Great Slave Lake with canoes, and proceed to the 
mouth of Great Fish River in order to determine certainly and finally 
the fate of their unfortunate countrymen. 
This expedition was the first to visit the country where the white 
men had perished, and great results were expected of it. It fact, as 
will be seen later, it did reach to within a very few miles of Starvation 
Cove, where many, and perhaps the last, of Franklin’s party died, and 
where the-records of the voyage seem to have been left, and then, 
without accomplishing anything it turned homewards. 
On the 22nd of June, 1855, Messrs. Anderson and Stewart, with 
three large birchbark canoes and a full complement of canoemen, 
started from Fort Resolution, but unfortunately without an Eskimo 
interpreter, or anyone who could understand the Eskimo language. 
Among the men who composed the party were “Thomas Mustagan” 
and “ Paulet Papanakies,’ steersmen, and Henry Fidler, Edward Kip- 
ling and Joseph Boucher, midmen. On the 2nd of July the canoes left 
Great Slave Lake at the “Mountain” and by a series of portages 
leading to Aylmer Lake the divide at the head of Great Fish River was 
reached on July 11th, and Montreal Island at the mouth of that river 
on August Ist, forty days after leaving Fort Resolution. A number ot 
