Anderson's Expedition.

383 and silver watch-cases, and fragments of other European articles, which no Esquimaux were likely to have acquired by gift or purchase. But, above all, there was a small silver plate with the words, Sir John Franklin, K.C.B.,' unmistakedly engraved on its surface. These relics were found in the possession of the Esquimaux by Dr. Rae himself, were bought by him, and actually transmitted to the Secretary of the Admiralty in October, 1854.

Mute witnesses like these could leave little doubt that one portion of the missing band, if not the survivors of the whole, had been overwhelmed by famine or by some other catastrophe. But the story has been corroborated by actual examination of the spot where the remnant of the adventurers is supposed to have expired. The British Government lost no time in requesting the Hudson's Bay Company to send out an expedition to the mouth of the Back River (or Great Fish River), Dr. Rae being of opinion that this stream and the low shore in the neighbourhood of Point Ogle and Montreal Island corresponded exactly with the description given him by the Esquimaux. The request was promptly met. A party of twelve canoe-men, led by two officers, and accompanied by Esquimaux interpreters, was speedily organized. Messrs. James Anderson and James Green Stewart, two of the company's chief traders, were the officers put in charge. They assembled at Fort Resolution (Great Slave Lake), in the summer of 1855, prepared to descend Back River as soon as the ice broke up. The voyage was performed in bark-canoes. Aided by three Indian boatmen, whose services were of the utmost value, these slender vessels were piloted down the stormy and impetuous stream. Without encountering any serious disaster, they reached the coast. There the melancholy search commenced. They fell in with a few natives, who indicated Montreal Island as the theatre of the tragedy. Thither the explorers proceeded with great difficulty, ten days being consumed in reaching it from the main land, though the distance was but some dozen miles. The results of the research were decisive. Various relics were discovered. Empty cases which had held preserved meats; kettles, a hammer, a letter-holder, and other things, were collected; but there was still more pointed proof that men belonging to the darkdoomed Erebus and Terror had once encamped on that miserable spot. Part of a boat was found-it bore the word Terror ! Another fragment was detected-it carried the name of Franklin himself. A snow-shoe, made of oak, was also picked up-it was impressed with the name of Dr. Stanley, the medical officer of the Erebus. From the Esquimaux the party obtained some scanty but touching information respecting the last hours of the Expedition.

6

One of the lost crew (says the Examiner, in an article of exquisite pathos*), they relate, died on Montreal Island, the rest perished on the coast of the mainland. The wolves were very thick.' Only one white man seems to have been living when their tribe arrived, and him it was too late to save. An Esquimaux woman saw him die. 'He was large and strong,' she said, and sat on the sandy beach, his head resting on his hands, and there he died. A death that shall not be forgotten by the poets in days hereafter.'

Such then probably is all we may ever learn of the weary wanderings and of the closing adventures of these Arctic martyrs. No written record may ever be rescued to tell the tale for which listening ears and sorrowing hearts would be found in every quarter of the globe. Would that those natives who possessed the few relics which have been recovered could also have produced the journal of the lost voyagers. Far more valuable would a few lines from the pencil of the leader have proved to many than all the vanished plays and missing decades of antiquity. But they died and made no sign! One hundred and thirty-eight men went out full of hope in the summer of 1845,. and in the spring of 1850, he who was probably the sole survivor of the company sat on a distant beach, with his head on his hands, thinking perhaps of the home he should never revisit, and of the friends he should never again behold. What a sad story that man could have related! He had doubtless witnessed the catastrophe which reduced the Expedition to a wreck. Perhaps many of his associates had perished before his eyes. Of the survivors, he had seen one after another succumb beneath the fierce cold of the Pole, and whilst he helped to deposit their bodies in the frozen ground, he knew there was little hope that his own would ever rest in one of the green churchyards of his native land. But bravely did this man battle with the snows and tempests of successive winters, and, worse than snows and tempests, with the frightful probabilities of death by famine and despair. What was the spell that kept them in bondage year after year he knew as we shall never know. But he was destined to endure all its horrors, and to drink the cup of captivity to its very dregs. Often, doubtless, the thought of relief might gleam like a midnight meteor across the dark horizon of his prospects. Would England forget her absent children? Would she make no effort to snap the icy bolts of their prison and to rescue her fettered sons? He understood her too well for that! He could believe that many were already engaged in loving search. Ships, indeed, were beating about in the seas, and sledges were gliding.

The Last Hours of Franklin's Band.

385 over the land, but who should tell them whither to steer in the desolate and trackless expanse ?*

Some of the explorers might possibly be in their very vicinity, and yet finding no clue, might turn their backs and retire sorrowfully home. And as each summer flashed across the earth, and no deliverer came, and the melting remnant of men was again immersed in the darkness of a Polar night, who can adequately imagine the sorrows of that deserted band? Their last winter must have been one of exquisite wretchedness. Weighed down with the hardships of long Arctic exposure-perhaps driven to the shelter of snow huts or of flimsy tents-depending upon the scanty supplies which enfeebled men could procure in a frozen wilderness-and with the consciousness that their strength was ebbing fast away, the heavy hours must have filed along in dull and torturing procession. But that winter, too, reached its conclusion, and, when the sun again smiled upon the whitened waste, those noble sufferers arose, and struggled hard to gain the American shore. On they crawled; and a sadder sight perhaps was not to be seen in our planet than the tottering forms and shrunken countenances of those desolate wayfarers. Whether famine brought them to the foulest of extremitieswhether comrade looked at comrade with a hungry glance, loathing, yet longing-whether the dying fastened with maddened appetite upon the dead, and, shuddering whilst they ate, purchased a few hours of existence upon the strength of this unnatural food-these are thoughts we would fain repudiate, spite of the suspicions which have been produced. But at length some of these ill-starred men did reach the main land, and then we may suppose their hopes would bloom out afresh. Alas! it was too late. Toil and privation had done their work. Death met them on the shore, and down he struck them, man by man, ere they could move from the coast. One alone remained. He must have been stout of heart and strong of limb to weather the hard

Assuming that Franklin attempted to carry out his instructions, in penetrating towards Behring's Straits, by pursuing a 'southward and westward course'-and taking it as a fact that a part of the expedition reached the estuary of the Back River-we can have little hesitation in concluding that he passed down Peel Sound into Victoria Strait, where his vessels were probably wrecked, or deserted. Now, in Sir John Ross' expedition of 1848-9, the eastern shore of Peel Sound was examined by an exploring party as far down as Four Rivers' Bay. Later on (spring of 1852), Captain Kennedy gained this Sound by passing a channel (as it appeared to be) in Brentford Bay; but seeing what seemed like a barrier of land to the north, he inferred that the Sound was not accessible to ships in that direction, and therefore did not prosecute his search to the south, which otherwise would have been his proper course.' Sir R. Murchison asserted before the Arctic Committee that, had he done so, he must have come upon the remains of Franklin's party.'

ships under which his companions had all expired. But his hour, too, had arrived. He sat him down upon that sandy beach. He rested his weary head upon his trembling hands, and his thoughts came fast and sorrowfully upon him. There were none to see him die save the Esquimaux woman, who stood aloof with a wondering eye, and the expectant wolf that prowled around him with its gluttonous glare. But the pulses of that gallant heart grew fainter and more flickering, the head drooped lower, the hands fell nerveless by his side, and soon that lonely man had ceased to exist.

It is not likely, perhaps, but could it be that the last survivor of the expedition was the intrepid Franklin himself?*

The

* We cannot close this article without a brief reference to the second Grinnell expedition, of which Dr. Kane's official report has been recently received. His search was conducted in a quarter where Franklin probably never thought of proceeding along the upper coast of Greenland into Smith's Sound-but as a specimen of bold enterprize and invincible endurance, it has never been surpassed. Reaching that Sound on the 5th August, 1853, he forced his way along the land through a difficult and precarious channel in the ice; and after a month's hard toil the brig (the Advance) was frozen in in lat. 78° 44'. The winter was one of terrific severity. Mercury was solid for nearly four months; the thermometer stood at 60° to 75° below zero. Lock-jaw appeared amongst the men. disorder extended to the dogs, of which fifty-seven perished. Sledge-expeditions, however, were executed, sometimes in darkness, for the sun was 120 days absent, and often at temperature as low as 50°. Smith's Sound was explored, and found to terminate to the north-east, in a gulf 110 miles in its long diameter. The coast of Greenland was traced, and an enormous glacier, running nearly due north, and 'cementing together by an icy union the continental masses of Greenland and America,' was observed, and followed at its base for eighty miles along a perpendicular and unbroken escarpment. The most interesting geographical point in this expedition was the discovery of a channel in 'Peabody Bay,' opening out into an expanse of water where no ice could be seen over a surface of 300 square miles--in fact, a Polar Sea. The second winter was spent en Esquimaux-living in huts, eating raw bear and walrus, and hunting whenever circumstances would permit. But the sufferings of the party were such that Dr. Kane considered it madness to brave the dangers of another season, and wisely wound up the adventure by a sledge-and-boat retreat.

ART. V. (1.) Les Ouvriers Européens: Etudes sur les Travaux, la Vie Domestique et la Condition Morale des Populations Ouvrières de l'Europe. Par M. F. LE PLAY. Paris: Imprimé par autorisation de l'Empereur, à l'Imprimerie impériale. 1855.

(2.) Budgets Economiques des Classes Ouvrières en Belgique. Par ED. DUCPETIAUX. Bruxelles: M. Hayez. 1855.

(3.) Letters on the Condition of the Working Classes of Nassau. By T. TWINING, Jun. London. 1853.

(4.) Mémoire relatif à une Exposition spéciale d'objets à l'usage des Classes Ouvrières. Par T. TWINING, fils. Imprimerie de Napoleon. Paris. 1855.

(5.) Galerie de l'Economie Domestique. J. CLAYE. Paris. 1855. (6.) Lettres sur le Pauperisme Français. Par AUG. COCHIN, le

Correspondant. Paris. 1855.

MUCH curiosity has ever been evinced for natural history. To show how birds build their nests, how silkworms brood, how the quadrupeds of the desert and the jungle provide for their young, a great deal of ingenuity has been put in requisition. Upon these and kindred subjects the elder Pliny wrote as many books as would break the back of an elephant; and one still greater than Pliny, whose time was quite as much absorbed in affairs of State as that of the courtly Roman, contrived to surpass even his researches in the same field. While, however, nature has been ransacked for the discovery of elementary laws and the social economy of the lower creation, the laws of human progress and the social economy of our species have been well nigh forgotten. Man, doubtless, was thought too trite a subject for popular investigation, or the facts were considered to be spread over too wide a surface to be brought within the grasp of a single mind. Hence one-half of the world were content to remain in ignorance of how the other half lived, and to parade their ignorance in the form of a popular apothegm. Even the great work which we have placed at the head of this article was the fruit of chance rather than of design. M. le Play, while travelling in the East, was led to make some inquiries concerning the domestic economy and social habitudes of the populations with whom he sojourned. As the results appeared to him the inverse of what he observed at home, he deemed a work, contrasting the two opposite poles of social life as they exist in infinitely diversified forms of combination throughout Europe might not be without benefit to mankind.

When M. le Play entered on the task, he was comparatively young. Since twenty years have passed over his head, and he