FRANKLIN’S MEN

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVI, Issue 24, 28 December 1925, Page 2

FRANKLIN’S MEN

“POLAR CLOUDS UPLIFT.” LOST TRIBES AT HUDSON. LONDON, Nov. 12. In the midst of the newspaper furore created by the conflicting statements as to what happened between Grettir Algarsson and Commander Frank Worsley during their Arctic expedition on the “Island,” a quiet announcement was made to the Royal Geographical Society by the Danish explorer, Dr. Knud Rasmussen, which partly withdrew the veil from a famous Polar tragedy of 80 vears ago. This was the - disappearance of the expedition which set forth under Sir John Franklin (who at one time had been a Governor of Tasmania) to discover the' North-West Passage. Rasmussen, who recently penetrated th« Passage during the course of his threo and a-half years’ expedition to study the habits of the Eskimos, discovered the remains of two of Franklin’s men. Ho built a cairn over the bodies as they lay, and above the cairn hoisted at half-mast the British and Danish flags. “Wo were glad to feel, as they perhaps might have been glad to feel.” ho said simply, “that the work for which they gave their lives was still going on.” Tho discovery was made through Rasmusen’s meeting at Polly Bay yihat white and silent place so often mentioned by Jack London) with an old Eskimo, Iggiararsuk, whose father had met somo of Franklin’s party. The father’s story, as transmitted to Iggiararsuk, was dramatically simple:

STARVING WHITE MEN. “We wero out hunting seal. Suddenly we heard the shouting of strange men from the land. (This was King William Island, to the immediate north of tho North-West Territories of Canada. It is situated at the apex of the anglo made by Victoria Strait and Ross Strait, as they converge to run into Franklin Strait and McClintock Channel respectively). We ran up to them, and saw that they were white men. They were thin, with sunken cheeks, like starving men. “We took them to our tent and gave them sea meat and blubber. They pointed towards the south, towards the Great Fish river (on the Canadian mainland), and made signs by which we understand that there had formerly been many comrades together, but only few were left.

“Afterwards, at another time, we found their ship. It was out in the ice between King William Island and Victoria Land. Many dead men were on the ship, and we could see that they had died of a sickness.

“Also, there was found a boat, with six dead men; there was food enough and it seemed that these also had died of a sickness.”

Iggiararsuk gave Rasmussen details of fourspots where lay the bones of Franklin’s men. He found two of these places, one on King William Island and tire other on the shore of Starvation Cove, on that part of the mainland known as Adelaide Peninsula. On the bodies of tho two dead men were still fragments of good seacloth.

PRIMITIVE PEOPLES. All the iron utensils and tools in possession of tho tribe at Pclly had come from the Ross Expedition, which had wintered in Victoria Strait a hundred years before. Rasmussen, whose journey covered 20,000 miles from Greenland, along the north of Canada and Alaska to Siberia found a tribe, two months’ sledgo journey inland from Hudson Bay, which had never before seen a white man. Their mode of life was the most primitive known, and they were apparently aboriginal Eskimos.

Many ether little-known tribes were discovered. They still used bows and arrows, and had never heard of the Great War. They invariably turned out fully armed to meet the explorers, but good relations were always established.

It is custoinary among these tribes to kill nearly all their female children at birth, unless they have .already been asked in marriage. One woman had killed seven of her baby daughters, yet, when her grown-up son died, she felt his loss so keenly that she cut a hole in the frozen ice of a lake and deliberately drowned herself. A youth who had helped to Jiang his father was so distressed by tho death of his mother that he stripped himself naked and committed suicide by freezing. A father, whoso son was to be hanged for the murder of two white men, committed suicide after three 1 utile attempts, so that his boy should not find himself alone on the other side.

DIED AS THEY WALKED. With regard to the Franklin expedition it may be s?called that, having set out in thopErebus arid ’ the Terror with 134 officers and men, it was last 6een in Baffin Bay by a whaler in July, 1845. Fifteen rescue expeditions, several financed by Lady Franklin, were despatched. Many relics were discovered, while skeletons along the coast told their tale of disaster.

A record found in a cairn contained the history of the expedition down to April, 1848. An addition in the handwriting of Captain Fitzjariies recounted how the Erebus and Terror, having become ice-bound, wero abandoned, Franklin having died on board one of the vessels in 1847.

In 1880 an American expedition found additional relics and skeletons, and the body of Lieut. Irving was brought to Edinburgh and buried. An Eskimo woman was tho last to see'the survivors of the Franklin expedition before they perished. There were 40 of them, starving, but staggering on. Tho end was close at hand, for, said she, “they fell down and died as they walked.”