STILL NO TIDINGS.

Press, Volume LXII, Issue 18673, 23 April 1926, Page 9

STILL NO TIDINGS.

* POLAR FLIGHT LEADER MISSING. (BI CABLE—PRESB ASSOCIATION—COPYBIOHT.) (AUSTRALIAN AND N.Z. CABLE ASSOCIATION.) •FAIRBANKS, April 21. There is still no tidings of Captain Wilkins, though flying conditions are good. It is believed he has been delayed for some unknown reason at Barrow. RELIC OF ILL-FATED VENTURE. (AUSTRALIAN AND N.Z. CABLE ASSOCIATION.) LONDON, April 21. A tin of beef forming part of the stores of the Franklin expedition, abandoned at Beechy Island, Barrow Strait, in 1845, was opened by Professor Beatty, of Liverpool University. The meat still looked eatable, though it was found among a heap of opened tins which Captain Fitzjames apparently threw away eighty-one years ago uneaten, leading to the supposition that the expedition failed through the Admiralty's faulty packing of the meat. [ln 1843, when Sir John Franklin I returned to England after a term as Governor of Tasmania, he_ was offered J the command of an expedition for the i discovery of a north-west passage to the Pacific. This offer he accepted, and the two ships comprising the expedition, the Erebus and the Terror, set out full of confidence. The ships were last seen by a whaler near the entrance of Lancaster Sound, and the first traces of them were found in 1851.]