100 FOOTNOTES FROM 



who was now nearly exhausted, was obliged to walk at 

 a gentle pace in the rear, Dr. Richardson kindly keeping 

 beside him, whilst Franklin led the foremost men, that 

 he might make them halt occasionally till the stragglers 

 came up. Credit, however, one of their most active 

 hunters, became lamentably weak, from the effects of 

 tripe de roche upon his constitution, and Vaillant, from 

 the same cause, was getting daily more emaciated. They 

 only advanced six miles during the day, and at night satis- 

 fied the cravings of hunger by a small quantity of tripe 

 de roche, mixed up with some scraps of roasted leather. 

 Having boiled and eaten the remains of their old shoes, 

 and every shred of leather which could be picked up, 

 they set forward at nine, like living skeletons, advancing 

 by inches, as it were, over bleak hills, separated by 

 equally barren valleys, which contained not the slightest 

 trace of vegetation except this eternal tripe de roche." 

 The dreadful uncertainty, that for so many long years, 

 hung over the fate of Franklin and his heroic comrades, 

 has at last been dispelled by the discovery, during 

 M'Clintock's recent search, of a large cairn at Cape Vic- 

 toria, in King William Land, containing, among other 

 mournfully interesting relics, a journal of one of the 

 officers of the lost expedition, announcing the intelligence 

 of the certain death of its leader on the llth of June 

 1847. A short distance beyond this fatal point, two 

 human skeletons were found in the bottom of an aban- 

 doned boat, with no food beside them except some tea, 

 chocolate and tripe de roche, on which miserable and 

 unnutritious diet they lingered out their existence in 

 these frightful solitudes, till death mercifully put an end 



