AVERTED INTEREST 
333 
lin was not a man of this kind; but he was determined 
to go. The nation admired his pluck with the generous 
impulse that prompts admiration of any action in which 
the means seem inadequate to the end in view ; the Admi- 
ralty and his personal friends recognised that his accept- 
ance of the command would heal a painful wound and 
satisfy the feeling dear to the official mind that seniority 
is the highest claim to employment. Moreover the Coun- 
cil of the Royal Society had sent a strong recommenda- 
tion of Franklin as the best possible commander of the 
new expedition, and that of itself would probably have 
decided the Government in the matter. 
The Erebus and Terror were overhauled, and to in- 
augurate the new era then dawning in the control of the 
sea they were fitted with auxiliary engines and screw 
propellers, being thus the first steam vessels to meet the 
polar ice. They sailed from England almost simultane- 
ously with the return of the Pagoda to the Cape of Good 
Hope. Captain Crozier was in command of the Terror 
as he had been under Ross in the Antarctic voyage; the 
popular hero Sir John Franklin commanded the Erebus 
and the expedition. On July 26, 1845, the old Antarctic 
ships were spoken by a whaler in Davis Strait and re- 
ported that both crews were all well and in remarkable 
spirits; then the curtain fell. 
This is not the place to repeat the oft-told tale of the 
long absence of news, the growing anxiety of friends at 
home, the lavish efforts of the Admiralty to obtain infor- 
mation by means of naval expeditions which were singu- 
larly though perhaps not inexplicably unfortunate, or of 
the magnificent perseverance of Lady Franklin, and the 
final discovery of authentic records by Sir Leopold 
McClintock during a private voyage in the little Fox. It 
