ces of the sixty. And between the day when the
Englishmen left her, and the day the Americans found her, she had spent
fifteen months and more alone. She was girt in by the ice of the Arctic
seas. No man knows where she went, what narrow scapes she passed
through, how low her thermometers marked cold;--it is a bit of her
history which was never written. Nor what befell her little tender, the
"Intrepid," which was left in her neighborhood, "ready for occupation,"
just as she was left. No man will ever tell of the nip that proved too
much for her,--of the opening of her seams, and her disappearance
beneath the ice. But here is the hardy Resolute, which, on the 15th of
May, 1854, her brave commander left, as he was ordered, "ready for
occupation,"--which the brave Captain Buddington found September 10,
1855, more than a thousand miles from there, and pronounced still "ready
for occupation";--and of what can be known of her history from Old
London to New London, from Old England's Thames to New England's Thames,
we will try to tell the story; as it is written in the letters of her
old officers and told by the lips of her new rescuers.

For Arctic work, if ships are to go into every nook and lane of ice that
will yield at all to wind and steam, they must be as nearly
indestructible as man can make them. For Arctic work, therefore, and for
discovery work, ships built of the _teak_ wood of Malabar and Java are
considered most precisely fitted. Ships built of teak are said to be
wholly indestructible by time. To this we owe the fact, which now
becomes part of a strange coincidence, that one of the old Captain
Cook's ships which went round the world with him has been, till within a
few years, a whaling among the American whalers, revisiting, as a
familiar thing, the shores which she was first to discover. The English
admiralty, eager to fit out for Arctic service a ship of the best build
they could find, bought the two teak-built ships Baboo and Ptarmigan in
1850,--sent them to their own dock-yards to be refitted, and the Baboo
became the Assistance,--the Ptarmigan became the Resolute, of their
squadrons of Arctic discovery.

Does the reader know that in the desolation of the Arctic shores the
Ptarmigan is the bird most often found? It is the Arctic grouse or
partridge,[15] and often have the ptarmigans of Melville Island
furnished sport and even dinners to the hungry officers of the
"Resolute," wholly unconscious that she had