332 SIEGE OF THE SOUTH POLE 
The Erebus and Terror were no sooner safe at home 
again than their services were required for a new expe- 
dition, this time to attempt the solution of the three-hun- 
dred-year-old problem of a North-West Passage from the 
Atlantic to the Pacific. The question of the command 
received some anxious thought at the Admiralty. Un- 
doubtedly had Ross wished it he would have had the ap- 
pointment, and his name was freely referred to in the 
newspapers of the time as the one man for the post ; but 
he declined it in advance, though tempted by the offer of 
a baronetcy and a good-service pension if he would con- 
sent to go. It has been said that an agreement with his 
wife’s family when he was married in 1843 prevented 
him from taking the command. In any case the southern 
voyage had been far more trying to the captain than to 
the crews, and the wear and tear of the ceaseless respon- 
sibility and anxiety made a prolonged rest desirable. 
Sir John Franklin had been recalled from his Governor- 
ship of Tasmania in a manner which incensed him deeply 
and made him at the age of fifty-nine nervously anxious 
to prove by some new achievement in his old field of 
Arctic exploration that he was indeed worthy of the con- 
fidence in which he was held by the public and by all de- 
partments of the Government except the Colonial Office. 
No one can doubt now, and probably no one who knew 
the facts of polar climate doubted then, that the willing 
spirit of Franklin caused him to underestimate the weak- 
ness of the flesh. The polar regions are fitted only for 
the efforts of young men in the zenith of their strength, 
the only possible exceptions being tough old whalers 
who have never had time to be softened by so much as 
a summer at home, and. the fitness of whose selection is 
attested by the fewness of their contemporaries. Frank- 
