nUST SERIES OF SEARCH EXPEDITIONS CLOSED. 485 



believe the report. No casualty had happened to any of the whalers, and 

 the two ships that were thus savagely destroyed could only, of course, 

 have been the " Erebus " and " Terror." If so, the search was at an 

 end, and everybody had better go back to England. The oflftcers of 

 the different ships constituted themselves temporarily into a board of 

 inquiry to investigate the subject. A number of the Eskimos of Cape 

 York, who must have known of the tragedy had it taken place, were 

 examined individually and together in the ship and on shore, and, to be 

 brief, the result was, that Adam Beck was branded by his countrynien as a 

 liar par excellence — being far in advance of his tribe in that respect. Cape 

 York was visited, and the bloodthirsty race who had burnt the " Erebus " 

 and "Terror," and massacred the crews, was found to consist of five 

 miserable half-naked and sufficiently inoffensive wretches of the lowest 

 Eskimo type. Beck's story, evidently false from the beginning, was now of 

 course disproved. A week afterwards, the " North Star," having got freed 

 from the ice of Wolstenholme Sound, fell in with Penny's " Lady Franklin " 

 and " Sophia " in Barrow Strait ; " and," writes Dr Sutherland of the latter 

 ship, " the report of the Eskimos at Cape York (who had disproved Beck's 

 story) was fully verified by the information which Mr Saunders gave us." 



After a winter of much discomfort and suffering, the " North Star " was 

 hauled out of her winter retreat on the 1st August 1850. Her commander 

 then took her across towards Lancaster Sound, where he saw and spoke 

 several of the vessels then engaged in the Franklin search. He touched 

 successively at Possession Bay, Whaler Point, Port Bowen, Jackson's Inlet, 

 and Port Neil ; and, according to Berthold Seemann, he deposited his cargo 

 of provisions in Navy Board Inlet, without acquainting any of the searching 

 vessels with that circumstance. On the 9th September Saunders steered for 

 home, where he arrived on the 28 th of the same month. 



With the unfortunate voyage of the " North Star," the first series of 

 expeditions sent out to seek for Franklin comes to an end. Neither of these 

 expeditions can be said to have been in any distinctive degree successful. 

 Indeed, these earlier expeditions were the only really unsuccessful and barren 

 enterprises organised either by our own Government or by America for the 

 purpose of prosecuting the Franklin search. For from 1849 onward to the 

 present day, the tale of Arctic exploration is enlivened and enriched with 

 the important successes of each succeeding expedition, from those of Austin 

 and Penny, who first struck upon Franklin's track, and of M'Clintock, who 

 first told us the whole sad story of his fate, to those of our own day, in 

 which we are discovering new lands beyond Nova Zembla, and new seas 

 beyond Smith's Soimd. 



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