far more useless and bulky than a few forks and spoons. I suppose, by 'silver plates,' your correspondent alludes to the silver plate with Sir John Franklin's name engraved thereon, and which may possibly weigh half an ounce-no great addition to a man's load.

Again, your correspondent says, 'that the ships have been abandoned, and pillaged by the Esquimaux.' In this opinion I perfectly agree so far as the abandonment of the ships, but not that the ships were pillaged by the natives. Had this been the case, wood would have been abundant among these poor people. It was not so, and they were reduced to the necessity of making their sledges of musk-ox skins folded up and frozen togetheran alternative to which the want of wood alone could have reduced them. Another proof that the natives had very little wood among them may be adduced. Before leaving Repulse Bay, I collected together some of the most respectable of the old Esquimaux, and distributed among them all the wood we could spare, amounting to two or three oars and some broken poles. When these things were delivered to them, I bade the Esquimaux interpreter, who speaks both his own and the English language fluently, to ask whether they or their acquaintances near Pelly Bay had now most wood. They all immediately shouted out, holding up their hands, that they themselves had most. I need scarcely add that, had the ships been found by the Esquimaux, a stock of wood sufficient for many years for all the natives within an extent of several hundred miles would have been obtained."

This evidence shows the fate of thirty-five of Franklin's men; but there were yet one hundred and three to be accounted for, together with the ships, and these remained involved in as much mystery as ever.

Sympathy is one of the greatest of human impulses, and when united to curiosity and a spirit of adventure, it leads to the truest heroism. These protracted searches aroused the sympathy of other nations, and two successive expeditions were dispatched from our own young country to aid in the search for the long-lost mariners.

The first American Expedition left New York in May, 1850. It was sent out by Mr. Henry Grinnell, an opulent merchant of that city, and is known as the "First Grinnell Expedition." It consisted of two small brigs, the Advance and the Rescue, under the command of Lieutenant E. De Haven, a young naval officer. Dr. E. K. Kane was surgeon and naturalist, and wrote a history of the expedition which, after a variety of adventure, returned in a little less than sixteen months.

The "Second Grinnell Expedition," popularly known as "Kane's Expedition," sailed from New York, May 30th, 1853. It consisted of a single vessel, the Advance, a small brig of one hundred and forty-four tuns burden, furnished by Mr. Grinnell. The expenses were contributed by various societies and individuals, among the latter of whom was Mr. Peabody, the eminent London banker, originally from Massachusetts. Dr. Kane, the commander, had under him eighteen chosen men, all young, and mostly less than thirty years of life.

"The specific features of Dr. Kane's plan of research consisted in making the land-masses of the north of Greenland the basis of operations, assuming, from the analogies of geographical structure, that Greenland was to be

regarded as a peninsula approaching the vicinity of the pole, rather than a congeries of islands connected by interior glaciers. On this hypothesis, the course was to pass up Baffin's Bay to the most northern attainable point, and thence, pressing on toward the Pole, as far as boats or sledges could reach, to examine the coast-lines for vestiges of the lost party. The equipment for the expedition was simple. A quantity of rough boards to serve for housing the vessel in winter, some India-rubber and canvas tents, and several strong sledges, built on a convenient model, completed the outfit. For provisions, they took a liberal supply of pemmican, a parcel of Borden's meat biscuit, some packages of prepared potato, a store of dried fruits and vegetables, beside pickled cabbage, the salt beef and pork of the navy ration, hard biscuit and flour. A moderate supply of liquors made up the bill of fare, although the party were pledged to total abstinence from this article, unless dispensed by special order.

In a month after leaving New York, and on the 1st of July, the Advance arrived at the harbor of Fiskernacs, in Greenland, among the clamor of its entire population assembled on the rocks to greet them. From thence they proceeded gradually along the coast, until the 27th of July, when they neared the entrance of Melville Bay. Here they encountered their first serious obstruction from the ice; Dr. Kane promptly decided to attempt a passage through the bay by a new track; and after a rough transit of eight days, the wisdom of the plan was confirmed by its success. In less than a week they entered Smith's Sound, and landing near Littleton's Island, deposited a boat with a supply of stores, with the view of securing a retreat in case of disaster. He says:

"We found to our surprise that we were not the first human beings who had sought a shelter in this desolate spot. A few ruined walls here and there showed that it had once been the seat of a rude settlement; and in the little knoll which we cleared away to cover in our storehouse of valuables, we found the mortal remains of their former inhabitants.

Nothing can be imagined more sad and homeless than these memorials of extinct life. Hardly a vestige of growth was traceable on the bare icerubbed rocks; and the huts resembled so much the broken fragments that surrounded them, that at first sight it was hard to distinguish one from the other. Walrus bones lay about in all directions, showing that this animal had furnished the staple of subsistence. There were some remains too of the fox and the narwhal; but I found no signs of the seal or reindeer.

These Esquimaux have no mother earth to receive their dead; but they seat them as in the attitude of repose, the knees drawn close to the body, and inclose them in a sack of skins. The implements of the living man are then grouped around him; they are covered with a rude dome of stones, and a cairn is piled above. piled above. This simple cenotaph will remain intact for generation after generation. The Esquimaux never disturb a grave."

On the western cape of Littleton Island, they erected a cairn, which might serve as a beacon to any following party, wedged a staff into the crevices of the rocks, and spreading the American flag, hailed its folds with three cheers as they expanded in the cold midnight breeze. They immediately resumed their course, beating toward the north against wind and tide, and soon arriving at the regions of thick-ribbed ice, where they were

compelled to moor their vessel to the rocks. Among the petty miscries which they now began to suffer, was a pack of some fifty dogs, which formed a very inconvenient appendage to the traveling party. These animals were voracious as wolves. It was no easy matter to supply such a hungry family with food. They devoured a couple of bears in eight days. Two pounds of raw flesh every other day was a scanty allowance; but to obtain this was almost impossible. The pemmican could not be sparedcorn-meal or beans they would not touch-and salt junk would have killed them. The timely discovery of a dead narwhal or unicorn proved an excellent relief, affording six hundred pounds of good wholesome flesh, though of a rather unsavory odor.

But a more serious trial was at hand. The vessel had been released from her moorings, and had fought her way through the ice for several days, when the sky gave tokens of an approaching storm. On the 20th of August, the tempest came on with unmistakable Arctic fury. Its effects can be described in no other words than those of the journal of the dauntless commander:

"By Saturday morning it blew a perfect hurricane. We had seen it coming, and were ready with three good hawsers out ahead, and all things snug on board. Still it came on heavier and heavier, and the ice began to drive more wildly than I thought I had ever seen it. I had just turned in to warm and dry myself during a momentary lull, and was stretching myself out in my bunk, when I heard the sharp twanging snap of a cord. Our six-inch hawser had parted, and we were swinging by the two others; the gale roaring like a lion to the southward.

Half a minute more, and 'twang, twang!' came a second report. I knew it was the whale-line by the shrillness of the ring. Our noble ten-inch manilla still held on. I was hurrying my last sock into its seal-skin boot, when McGary came waddling down the companion-ladders :-'Captain Kane, she won't hold much longer; it's blowing the devil himself, and I am afraid to surge.'

The manilla cable was proving its excellence when I reached the deck; and the crew, as they gathered round me, were loud in its praises. We could hear its deep Eolian chant, swelling through all the rattle of the running gear, and moaning of the shrouds. It was the death-song! The strands gave way, with the noise of a shotted gun; and in the smoke that followed their recoil, we were dragged out by the wild ice at its mercy.

We steadied and did some pretty warping, and got the brig a good bed in the rushing drift; but it all came to nothing. We then tried to beat back through the narrow ice-clogged water-way, that was driving a quarter of a mile wide, between the shore and the pack. It cost us two hours of hard labor, I thought, skillfully bestowed; but at the end of that time we were at least four miles off, opposite the great valley in the center of Bedeviled Reach. Ahead of us, farther to the north, we could see the strait growing still narrower, and the heavy ice-tables grinding up and clogging it between the shore-cliffs on one side and the ledge on the other. There was but one thing left for us, to keep in some sort the command of the helm, by going freely where we must otherwise be driven. We allowed her to scud under a reefed foretopsail; all hands watching the enemy, as we closed, in silence.

At seven in the morning we were close upon the piling masses. We dropped our heaviest anchor, with the desperate hope of winding the brig; but there was no withstanding the ice-torrent that followed us. We had only time to fasten a spar as a buoy to the chain, and let her slip. So went our best bower!

Down we went upon the gale again, helplessly scraping along a lee of ice seldom less than thirty feet thick; one floe, measured by a line, as we tried to fasten it, more than forty. I had seen such ice only once before, and never in such rapid motion. One upturned mass rose above our gunwale, smashing in our bulwarks, and depositing half a tun of ice in a lump upon our decks. Our stanch little brig bore herself through all this wild adventure as if she had a charmed life.

But a new enemy came in sight ahead. Directly in our way, just beyond the line of floe-ice against which we were alternately sliding and thumping, was a group of bergs. We had no power to avoid them; and the only question was whether we were to be dashed in pieces against them, or whether they might not offer us some providential nook of refuge from the storm. But, as we neared them, we perceived that they were at some distance from the floe-edge, and separated from it by an interval of open water. Our hopes rose, as the gale drove us toward this passage, and into it; and we were ready to exult when, from some unexplained cause-probably an eddy of the wind against the lofty ice-walls-we lost our headway. Almost at the same moment we saw that the bergs were not at rest; that, with a momentum of their own, they were bearing down upon the other ice, and that it must be our fate to be crushed between the two.

Just then a broad sconce-piece or low water-washed berg came driving up from the southward. The thought flashed upon me of one of our escapes in Melville Bay; and as the sconce moved rapidly close alongside us, McGary managed to plant an anchor on its slope, and hold on to it by a whale-line. It was an anxious moment. Our noble tow-horse, whiter than the pale horse that seemed to be pursuing us, hauled us bravely on, the spray dashing over his windward flanks, and his forehead plowing up the lesser ice as if in scorn. The bergs encroached upon us as we advanced. Our channel narrowed to a width of perhaps forty feet; we braced the yards to clear the impending ice-walls. We passed clear; but it was a close shave

so close that our port quarter-boat would have been crushed if we had not taken it in from the davits-and found ourselves under the lee of a berg, in a comparatively open lead. Never did heart-tried men acknowledge with more gratitude their merciful deliverance from a wretched death.

come.

The day had already its full share of trials; but there were more to A flaw drove us from our shelter, and the gale soon carried us beyond the end of the lead. We were again in the ice, sometimes escaping its onset by warping, sometimes forced to rely on the strength and buoyancy of the brig to stand its pressure, sometimes scudding wildly through the halfopen drift. Our jibboom was snapped off in the cap; we carried away our barricade stanchions, and were forced to leave our little Erie, with three brave fellows and their warps, out upon the floes behind us.

A little pool of open water received us at last. It was just beyond a lofty cape that rose up like a wall, and under an iceberg that anchored itself

at one

between us and the gale. And here, close under the frowning shore of Greenland, ten miles nearer the pole than our holding-ground of the morning, the men have turned in to rest. I was afraid to join them, for the gale was unbroken, and the floes kept pressing heavily upon our berg time so heavily as to sway it on its vertical axis toward the shore, and make its pinnacle overhang our vessel. My poor fellows had but a precarious sleep before our little harbor was broken up. They hardly reached the deck when we were driven astern, our rudder splintered, and the pintles torn from their boltings.

Now began the nippings. The first shock took us on our port quarter; the brig bearing it well, and, after a moment of the old-fashioned suspense, rising by jerks handsomely. The next was from a veteran floe, tongued and honeycombed, but floating in a single table over twenty feet in thickness. Of course, no wood or iron could stand this; but the shoreward face of our iceberg happened to present an inclined plane, descending deep into the water, and up this the brig was driven, as if some great steam screw-power was forcing her into a dry-dock.

At one time I expected to see her carried bodily up its face and tumbled over on her side. But one of those mysterious relaxations, which I have elsewhere called the pulses of the ice, lowered us quite gradually down again into the rubbish, and we were forced out of the line of pressure toward the shore. Here we succeeded in carrying out a warp and making fast. We grounded as the tide fell, and would have heeled over to seaward but for a mass of detached land-ice that grounded alongside of us, and although it stove our bulwarks as we rolled over, it shored us up."

We must also give his account of the sequel:

"I could hardly get to my bunk, as I went down into our littered cabin on the Sunday morning after our hard-working vigil of thirty-six hours. Bags of clothing, food, tents, India-rubber blankets, and the hundred little personal matters which every man likes to save in time of trouble, were scattered around in places where the owners thought they might have them at hand. The pemmican had been on deck, the boats equipped, and everything of real importance ready for a march, many hours before.

During the whole of the scenes I have been trying to describe, I could not help being struck by the composed and manly demeanor of my comrades. The turmoil of ice, under a heavy sea, often conveys the impression of danger when the reality is absent; but in this fearful passage, the parting of our hawsers, the loss of our anchors, the abrupt crushing of our stoven bulwarks, and the actual deposit of ice upon our decks, would have tried the nerves of the most experienced icemen. All-officers and men--worked alike. Upon each occasion of collision with the ice which formed our lee coast, efforts were made to carry out lines; and some narrow escapes were incurred by the zeal of the parties leading them into positions of danger. Mr. Bonsall avoided being crushed by leaping to a floating fragment; and no less than four of our men at one time were carried down by the drift, and could only be recovered by a relief party after the gale had subsided.

As our brig, borne on by the ice, commenced her ascent of the berg, the suspense was oppressive. The immense blocks piled against her, rango upon range, pressing themselves under her keel, and throwing her over upon