Preliminary Chapter. xiii 



travelers. His Second Expedition, as distinguished from \\u'. Tliinl, will 

 also be found to be closely connected with the First and with the 

 course of American and English Arctic exploration during the j)re- 

 ceding twenty years ; for the two voyages of 1860-62 and of 1864-'(>1) 

 were ahke "Franklin Relief" Expeditions, in which Hall endeav- 

 ored to complete the work begun by Lieutenant De Haven, Dr. E. K. 

 Kane, of the United States Navy, and their associates, and by more 

 than thirty English relief parties which had preceded them. 



Sympathy for the mysterious fate of Franklin's Expedition was 

 universal. In Hall it kindled a spirit of enthusiasm which failed him 

 only with his life It early became his controling idea. Through the 

 nine years from May, 1850 when Secretary Preston's Instructions for 

 the First Grinnell Expedition issued to Lieutenant De Haven, to the 

 return of the English steamer Fox, he was steadily increasing his 

 Arctic library, and devoting every spare hour to Arctic study ; and his 

 notes and comments show his interest in all such returns from the 

 searched region as Dr. Rae, in 1854, brought from Boothia, De Haven 

 and Kane from Beechy Island, or McClintock from King William's 

 Land. 



On the return of the officer last named. Hall urged that the explo- 

 rations made by him and his junior officers, Hobson and Young, 

 though eminently successful, still left much of value to be secured ; 

 that they had been made, by necessity, in the month of May when 

 the land was still covered with snow, and that interviews witli the 

 Eskimos had been found practicable with detached parties only. 

 Hoping for further success in a more favorable season of the year, and 

 believing that " as England had left the field of search, the Stars and 

 Stripes should enter," he sailed from New London, Conn., in May, 



