From The Nineteenth Century.
SIR JOHN FRANKLIN.

BY SIR HENRY ELLIOT.

IN the series of "The World's Great Explorers" Captain Markham has pubished the life of one of the noblest of a 'ong list of noble names; and having, as a very young man, lived for three years as one of the family in the house of Sir John Franklin, for whom I had the affection of a son for his father, I am anxious, through the medium of this review, to bring before those who may not have had the opportunity of seeing Captain Markham's volume a condensed account of a character and career which well deserve to be more generally known. When we remember the deep interest that was felt in the fate of Sir John Franklin and his gallant companions during the many years in which it was wrapped in mystery, as testified by the numerous expeditions organized by private enterprise for their relief both in this country and in America, it is strange that until now no full record of his life and work should have been given to the public.

The consequence has been that, to the great majority of the present generation, the name of Franklin is only known as that of one who perished in an Arctic expedition, or, as it would more probably be said, in an attempt to reach the North Pole; while not one in a thousand is aware that this was but a sequel to what had gone before, that he had devoted years of his life to geographical exploration, and that in previous expeditions he had faced hardships and sufferings that can scarcely have been exceeded in the one which ended so tragically.

sandbank scarcely above high-water mark and out of the usual track of ships; and in after life he took part, either as leader or as second in command, in no less than four Arctic expeditions.

Franklin's sea life began in a merchantman, in which his father had sent him on a short voyage in the hope of weaning him from a fancy for being a sailor, so common among high-spirited boys; but, as he returned more wedded to it than ever, no further opposition was offered to his inclinations, and in 1800, at the age of fourteen, he entered the royal navy as a midshipman in the two-decked ship Polyphemus, in which he served at the battle of Copenhagen in the following spring. The Polyphemus, carrying the flag of Rear-Admiral Graves, took her full share in that great fight, and, having been laid alongside of two of the Danish menof-war, silenced their guns and took possession of them with a loss of thirty men in killed and wounded.

A few months later he was appointed to the Investigator, under Captain Flinders, who had orders to survey the coast of what was then called New Holland, and afterwards at Flinders's suggestion renamed Australia.

The ship was barely seaworthy and little fitted for the magnitude of the task imposed upon her commander, who was instructed to make a complete survey of the enormous stretch of coast of the Australian continent or island, of the greater part of which little beyond the barest outline was then known. He began his work at the south-western corner of what is now western Australia, following it along the whole of the southern and eastern At the beginning of the century the life coasts till he reached the Gulf of Carpenof a sailor was constantly one of adventure taria in the extreme north. Here he and privation, and Franklin had more found the Investigator in such a dangerous than a common share of both; before he state that he was obliged to return to was twenty years of age he had been pres- Sydney, having, however, ascertained the ent at Nelson's two greatest victories; he existence of a channel for ships through had taken part in a fight in which a fleet Torres Straits. At Sydney, which was of merchant ships successfully beat off a then only a convict settlement, the Inves powerful squadron of French men-of-war; tigator was surveyed, and being found to he had navigated waters that had scarcely be so rotten that no repairs could make been visited except by a few explorers; her seaworthy, her captain and what rehe had been wrecked on an unknown reef mained of her crew were embarked on a and imprisoned for two months on a small | small vessel named the Porpoise, which

was to convey them to England. They | a far worse plight, very little of that ship had been employed on a highly dangerous remaining above water, the crew having service, and, having in the course of it passed the night clinging in desperation lost many men by disease, by drowning, and by accidents, others being invalided and remaining at Sydney, out of a total of eighty officers and men who left England in the Investigator only twenty, with Franklin among them, embarked in the Porpoise to return to it.

the two crews on board the Rolla, which | squadron, consisting of a line-of-battle was bound to Canton. Captain Flinders, on the other hand, in his anxiety to get back to England with his charts and journals, determined to attempt the direct passage home in the Cumberland, a schooner of barely twenty-nine tons burden; but his zeal proved unfortunate, as it led to his being made prisoner by the French, and detained in the Mauritius six years.

ship of seventy-four guns, two powerful frigates, a twenty-two-gun corvette, and a sixteen-gun brig. Dance, instead of endeavoring to escape, determined to show fight, and at once made the signal to attack, which was so vigorously obeyed that the French, believing they had to do with men-of-war, shortly ceased firing and made off, pursued for two hours by this fleet of merchantmen, in one of which Franklin had acted as signal midshipman.

On his arrival in England he was at once appointed to the Bellerophon, and at the battle of Trafalgar, on the 21st of October, 1805, in which his ship lost her captain and her master, and had one hundred and fifty-five of her crew killed and wounded, he again acted as signal midshipman. But although till the end of the war he saw much service and some hard fighting, especially in the attack on New Orleans, where he was wounded, it is not intended to follow his career till he entered upon the series of Arctic expeditions which have immortalized his name. The first of these was in 1818, and con

Before he left England he had obtained a passport from the French government as an officer engaged on a purely pacific scientific work of interest to all maritime nations, but the ship named in it was the Investigator, and when, in full reliance upon it, he appeared in the Cumberland off the Mauritius, which then belonged to France, a shabby pretext was afforded for disregarding the safe-conduct; his papers were taken from him, and with inexpressible meanness were utilized in making French charts, some of them not even being returned when he was set at liberty. The rest of the shipwrecked men fared better; they arrived safely at Hongkong, where they found a fleet of the East India|sisted of the Dorothea, under Commander Company's merchant ships on the point of sailing for England, and Franklin, who with most of his companions went with them, had thus the opportunity of taking part in one of the most remarkable fights that ever occurred.

Buchan, and the brig Trent, under Lieutenant Franklin as second in command, with orders to proceed to the Spitzbergen seas; from thence steering due north to try to reach the North Pole, and to return by Behring's Straits. But, failing to reach the Pole, the expedition was to endeavor to make the north-west passage to the Straits.

The belief prevailed at the time, and indeed for many years later, that in the vicinity of the Pole the sea was free from ice; but about the eightieth degree of

The larger Indiamen of those days were armed with guns of small calibre, chiefly as a protection against the privateers and pirates that infested the Eastern seas; their crews, composed mainly of Lascars and Chinamen, were small, though well disciplined; but they were not in any sense of the word men-of-war, but mer-latitude the ships encountered an impenechantmen, and the fleet in question, under the command of Commodore Dance, of the East India Company's service, consisting of eighteen Indiamen and a number of small country vessels, carried cargoes of enormous value. They offered a tempting prize to any enemy who could capture them, and consequently, when entering the Straits of Malacca, they found Admiral Linois, one of the most gallant officers in the French service, lying in wait to intercept them with a

trable barrier, and escaping much damaged from imminent danger of being crushed by the ice they returned to England without much having been accomplished.

The next expedition in which Franklin was engaged, and of which he was given the command, was of an entirely different nature. It had long been hoped that the voyage of vessels to China and the Pacific might be shortened by the discovery of a practicable north-west passage to Beh

After ascertaining and fixing the position of the mouth of the Coppermine, Franklin at once set about the execution of his orders to examine the coast to the eastward of it, which was a work of great difficulty and extreme risk.

ring's Straits, a reward of 20,000l. having | only overcome by the determination of a been promised as far back as 1745 to the leader cheerfully seconded by those under first person who should accomplish it, and him, they sink to insignificance when in 1818 it was determined to send out two compared with those met with on the recombined expeditions with a view to the turn journey. discovery of the long-wished-for passage. The one of these, under Lieutenant Parry afterwards the famous Arctic navigator Sir Edward Parry was to proceed with the two ships Hecla and Griper through Baffin's Bay, and to endeavor to reach Behring's Straits by any practicable channel that he found to the west; the other, and by far the most arduous of the two, which was placed under the command of Lieutenant Franklin, was a land expedition of so perilous a nature that every member of it was brought within a hair's breadth of destruction after privations and sufferings in which many of them lost their lives. His orders were to proceed to Hudson's Bay, and to penetrate the territories of the Hudson Bay Company as far as the Coppermine River, and, after getting all the information and supplies that he could obtain at the Company's station, to endeavor to ascertain where that river fell into the Arctic Sea, and then to survey the coast to the east ward, where it was thought he might fall in with Parry, who would be prosecuting his search for the passage towards the west with his two ships.

The expedition was admirably composed; it had Franklin for a leader, and he had under him Dr. Richardson, George Back, and Robert Hood, of whom the two first afterwards made names for themselves, while the last, who was a most promising young officer, met with a tragical fate. In addition to these there was John Hepburn, a man-of-war sailor, to whose simple devotion to his chief and to his duty the party greatly owed their escape from the destruction with which they were threatened. The expedition arrived at York Factory, in Hudson's Bay, at the end of June, and after a short time spent in making preparations, in which they received every assistance from the Company's officials, it started on its inland journey.

It was not, however, till the third summer after leaving York Factory, and after passing two dreary winters with insufficient food and scanty means of protection against the cold, that they reached the Coppermine River, and finally launched the boats they had dragged with them on the Arctic Ocean; but space will not allow us to follow their laborious march, for full as this was of hardships and difficulties,

The "boats" with which he had to prosecute it were only the canoes used by the Hudson Bay Company on the rivers in the fur trade with the Indians, and with these frail barks, little adapted to ocean navigation, and constantly threatened with destruction from the ice and from the sea with which they were not fitted to contend, he proceeded along a rocky shore for above six hundred miles before, find. ing no signs of Parry, he reluctantly resolved to abandon further search and to return. It was well that he did so; for, had he persisted, it is unlikely that any of the party would have escaped with their lives, as their provisions were already so nearly exhausted that it would be difficult to reach a station where supplies could be obtained unless they took a course where they might fall in with hunting Indians or might themselves kill some game. Franklin therefore decided, instead of going back by the Coppermine, to attempt a direct route to Fort Enterprise, where the last winter was passed, which, as well as being much shorter, would, it was hoped, lead through the Indian hunting grounds.

The party left Point Turnagain, the most eastern point it had reached, on the 22nd of August on its return journey, prepared, no doubt, for privations and hardships, but little anticipating the extent of the sufferings in reserve for them.

To those who are unacquainted with Franklin's own simple but more detailed narrative of the expedition, Captain Markham's account will convey a vivid picture of what those sufferings were. They will learn how the whole party, after keeping themselves alive on pieces of old shoeleather and rock lichen, were reduced to the very verge of starvation when saved by the arrival of relief obtained by the energy and determination of Back, afterwards famous in Arctic exploration; how the instinct of self-preservation had degraded one of the number- a Canadian voyager-to resort to murder and cannibalism, while the excess of suffering called forth the noblest qualities of others, who, at the imminent risk of their own

lives, stayed behind with their weaker | survey the coast to the eastward as far as comrades who were too feeble to walk, the Coppermine, and the other should and how when all these had dropped off push to the west in the hopes of meeting only two survivors out of a rear party of Beechey. eight dragged themselves forward and joined those in advance, only to find them incapable of moving and doomed to certain death unless relieved within a very few days.

The battle of Navarino, fought two years before, had been followed by the recognition of the independence of Greece, This expedition, like the last, was to but no sooner had the Greeks got rid of proceed by land to the examination of the the Turks than they split into hostile facunknown northern coast of America, and, tions threatening civil war and universal like it also, it was combined with expedi- anarchy. Nowhere was the danger greater tions sent by sea. Parry with two ships than at Patras, the most important trading was to renew his attempt to effect the town of Greece, situated at the entrance north-west passage from Baffin's Bay, and of the Gulf of Corinth and inhabited by Captain Beechey, in the Blossom, was to many Ionians entitled to British protecfollow the coast eastward as far as he tion, who were menaced on the one side could penetrate from Behring's Straits; by pillage by Palikaris and wild Roumewhile Franklin was to descend the Macliotes eager to attack them, while their kenzie River to the sea, where his party only defenders were a body of scarcely was to divide, so that one-half of it should less wild irregular troops in the service