AN ARCTIC TRAGEDY

Evening Star, Issue 20056, 22 December 1928, Page 3

AN ARCTIC TRAGEDY

GRUESOME DISCOVERY [From Our Own Correspondent.] SAN FRANCISCO. November 14. Supplementing brief details sent out by tho Royal Canadian Mounted Police from the Far North, Barney Muirhead, back in Cobalt, Ontario, after spending tho summer with the Nipissing Mine prospecting party which crossed from Edmonton, in Alberta, to Hudson Bay, by way of Great Slave Lake and Chesterfield Inlet, has brought home with him a fuller account of the grim fate which overtook John Hornby, member of a well-known English family of explorers, and his two nephews in the barren lands of the frigid Arctic. The trio disappeared nearly two years ago, and no word of their wehereabouts came through until a company of Cobalt mining prospectors found three skeletons in a log cabin on the Thelon River, far to the west of Chesterfield Inlet.

Hornby and his nephews started east from Fort Reliance late in 1926, and Mr Muirhead says that it was evident they had all been dead eighteen months when the Cobaiters, headed by Henry Wilson, came across the cabin. When Wilson and his men reached the cabin they found two of the skeletons outside the small building of logs, and the third man, apparently Horpby himself, in a bunk inside. The theory is that the elder man, having more experience of the country, had been the last to succumb. WRAPPED IN BLANKETS.

Of the two skeletons found outside the cabin, one bad been carefully rolled in blankets, and he evidently had been the first to die. The other seemingly, had been .dragged out by the survivor, who himself had been too weak to cover tlio remains fully. Tho third man then had retired into the cabin, bad placed the button on the door, and had crawled into the bunk to die miserably from cold and hunger. Muirhead thinks the two younger men, making their first trip across the barren lands, had been overcome by sickness. Their rifles were outside near their remains, which consisted only of hair and bones. When the cabin was first searched nothing was seen of the skeleton in the bunk, and a second visit was required before it was noticed. Inside the cabin the only food found was a small quantity of tea. Wood cut all bad been consumed, Muirhead said. There was plenty of ammunition, but it is considered from the absence of animal skins that the party had missed , the caribou migration. An old diary of Hornby’s was found, also his packsack, filled with white fox furs. The Wilson party did not disturb the cabin, but pushed on to Chesterfield Inlet, where tho story was told to Inspector Joyce, in charge of tho police post there. Arrangements were to have been made to send an aeroplane to complete the investigation, but Muirhead said he understood that this was not found feasible this season.