rest to the flocks of sightseers in the
neighbourhood, they seemed like very leviathans of the deep. Vast
quantities of stores were being loaded into the ships, enough, it was
said, for the subsistence of the one hundred and thirty-four members of
the expedition for three years. For it was now known that Arctic
explorers must be prepared to face the winter, icebound in their ships
through the long polar night. That the winter could be faced with
success had been shown by the experience of Sir William Parry, whose
ships, the _Fury_ and the _Hecla_, had been ice-bound for two winters
(1821-23), and still more by that of Captain John Ross, who brought
home the crew of the _Victory_ safe and sound in 1833, after four
winters in the ice.

[Illustration: Sir John Franklin. From the National Portrait Gallery.]

All England was eager with expectancy over the new expedition. It was
to be commanded by Sir John Franklin, the greatest sailor of the day,
who had just returned from his five years in Van Diemen's Land and
carried his fifty-nine winters as jauntily as a midshipman. The era
was auspicious. A new reign under a {114} queen already beloved had
just opened. There was every hope of a long, some people said a
perpetual, peace: it seemed fitting that the new triumphs of commerce
and science, of steam and the magnetic telegraph, should replace the
older and cruder glories of war.

The expedition was well equipped for scientific research, but its main
object was the discovery of the North-West Passage. We have already
seen what this phrase had come to mean. It had now no reference to the
uses of commerce. The question was purely one of geography. The ocean
lying north of America was known to be largely occupied by a vast
archipelago, between which were open sounds and seas, filled for the
greater part of the year with huge packs of ice. In the Arctic winter
all was frozen into an unending plain of snow, broken by distorted
hummocks of ice, and here and there showing the frowning rocks of a
mountainous country swept clean by the Arctic blast. In the winter
deep night and intense cold settled on the scene. But in the short
Arctic summer the ice-pack moved away from the shores. Lanes of water
extended here and there, and sometimes, by the good fortune of a gale,
a great sheet of open sea with blue tossing waves gladdened the heart
of the {115} sailor. Through this region somewhere a water-way must
exist from eas