FRANKLIN'S MEN

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXII, Issue 19478, 26 December 1925, Page 8

FRANKLIN'S MEN

•‘POLAR CLOUDS UPLIFT.” RASMUSSEN’S STORY. LOST TRIBES AT HUDSON. 1 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 • ‘lsland,” a quiet announcement was made to the Royal Geographical Society by the Dutch explorer. Dr. Knud Rasmussen, which partly withdrew the veil from a famous Polar tragedy of 80 years ago. This was the disapearance of the expedition which set forth under Sir John Franklin (who at one time had been a Governor of Tasmania • to discover the North East Passage. Rasmussen, who recently penetrated the Passage during the course of his three md a half years’ expeditions to study the habits of the Eskimos, discovered the remains of two of Franklin’s men. He built a cairn over the bodies as they lay. and above the cairn hoisted at half-mast the British and Danish flags. “We were glad to feel, as they perhaps might have been glad to feel,” h» said simly, “that the work for which they gave their lives was still going on.” The discovery was made through Rasmussen’s meeting, at Pclly Bay (that white and silent place so often mentioned by .Tack London*, with an old Eskimo, Iggiararsuk, whose father had met some of Franklin’s partv. The father’s story, as transmitted to Iggiararsuk, was dramatically simple:— Starving White Men. "Wc were out hunting seal. Suddenly we heard the shouting of strange men from the land. (This was King "William Island, to the immediate rortu of the North-West Territories of Canada. It is situated at the apex of the angle made by Victoria Strait and Ross Strait, as they converge to run into Franklin Strait and the McClintock Channel respectively). Wo 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 tont and eave them seal meat end 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 sickness. '■'Also there was found a boat, with blx dead men; there was food enough, and it seemed that these also had died of a sickness. ” Iggiararsuk gave Rasmussen details of four wpots where lay the bones of Franklin’s men. He found two of these places, one on King William Island, and the other on the shore of Starvation Cove, on that part of the mainland known as Adelaide Peninsula. On the bodies of the two dead men were itill fragments of good sea-cloth. Primitive Peoples. ’ Al Ithe iron utensils and tools in possession of the tribe at Polly had come from the Ross Expedition, which had wintered in Victoria Strait a hundred years before. Rasmhssen, whose journey covered 20,000 miles from Greenland, along the north of Canada and Alaska to Siberia found a tribe, two

month’s sledge journey inland from Hudson Bay, which had never before seen a while man. Their mode of life was the most primitive known, and they were apparently aboriginal Eskimos. Many other little-known tribes red. They still used bows and arrows, and had never } eard of the Great War. They invariably turned out fully armed to meet the explorers, but good relations were always established. It is customary 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 the 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 hang his father was so distressed by the death of his mother that he stripped himself naked and committed suicide by freezing. A father, whose son was to be hanged for the murder of two white men. committed suicide after three futile 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 recalled that, having set out in the Erebus and the Terror with 134 officers and men, it was last seen in Baffin Bay by a whaler in July, 1845. Fifteen rescue expeditions, several financed by Lady Franklin, were despatched. Al any relics were discovered, while skeletons along the coast told their tale of dis-

A record found in a cairn contained the history of the expedition down to April. 1848. An addition in the handwriting of Captain Fitzjames recounted how the Erebus and Terror, having become icebound, were abandoned, Franklin having died on board one of the vessels in 1847. In I*Bo an American expedition found additional relics and skeletons. :nd the body < f Lieut. Irving was brought to Edinburgh and buried. An Eskimo woman was the last to >ne the survivors of the Franklin expedition before they perished. There were 40 of them, starving, but staggering on. The eml was close at hand, for, said she, “they fell down and died as thev walked.”