Evening Star Newspaper, October 26, 1930, Page 83

FlctlonJ The Sunday Star Magasine “’:\SlllNGle, ]). ., The Arctic’s Greatest T, ragedy OCTOBE R 26 1930. Features 24 ‘PAGES. ey Explorers Traveling by Airplane Discovered, During the Unusual Warmth of the Last Summer, the Final Clues in One of the Far North’s Great Mysteries--the Disappearance of the Franklin Expedition, Two Ships and One Hundred and Twwenty-Nine Men, They forced their way through the ice to King William Land. Here one of the vessels was forced onto the shore. From an Old Engraving. HE chill September air was strangely quiet as th2 huge, gray-winged Fok- ker cleaved its way toward the North Magnetic Pole. Peering through the light haze, Maj. L. T. Burwash and his pilot, W. E. Gilbert, could see, on the mov- ing carpet a thousand feet beneath, narrow ~lanes of gray-green water, strongly contrasted against the spotless white of the surrounding ice and snow. Somewhere beiween their objective and Bering Strait, at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, lay the bones of a hundred ships, vic- tims of the winds and currents that churned the drifting pack and crushed their oaken sides. Other whaling ships, stouter or more fortunate, whirling about in a never-ending circle—members of the “phantom fleet”— might have escaped the crushing impact of the floes, might still be drifting aimlessly about, with skeletons on their decks, in that “Sargasso Sea” of the great white north. Small wonder that Burwash and his pilot kept a sharp look- out while the expedition’s photographer mapped the coast line from the air. Weeks before, when wireless reports of the Andree discovery were crackling through the Spitzbergen wastes, Burwash and Gilbert had set out, under the auspices of the Department of the Interior of Canada, to clear up one of the greatest mysteries of the arctic—the dis- appearpnce of Sir John Franklin and his two ships, the Erebus and Terror. Eighty-five years before Sir John, then the Peary of an era when polar exploration was & man’s game, had set out to seek a practicable water route—a northwest passage—from the North Atlantic to the North Pacific. The story of this enterprise and of its gallant leader is one of the most tragic in the history of arctic exploration. In the long succession of polar Journeys, dating from the dawn of British his- tory, when King Alfred drove back the invading Danes, this elabora‘ely outfitted expedition was the most disastrous. Of the 129 adventurers Which Vanished There Eighty-Five Years Ago. By Burt M. McConnell, Meteorologist of the Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913-14. who sailed with Pranklin from England in the Summer of 1845, not one returned. EXPEDITION after expedition went out in search of them, many to meet disaster themselves. Their findings down through the years pieced together a fragmentary story of the ill-fated explorers. From all that has been gathered it seems that Franklin’s two ships passed - their first Winter at Beechy Island, after having previcusly explored Wellington Channel as far as 75 degrees north, and sailed down again into Barrow Strait, between Corn- wallis and Bathurst Islands. The next year, 1846, they appear to have fought their way through the drifting ice flelds of Peel Channel until beset by the ice of King William Land. One of their vessels must have sunk in the deep water there after having been crushed in the ice. The other was forced into the shore of King William Land by the drifting ice, and there it lay for years, furnishing the Eskimos with wood for their sleds, bows and arrows and iron for their knives, spears and axes. When the ice did not break up during the Summer of 1847 and allow their ship to be floated again, the men realized that they were doomed to a third Winter in the Polar wilder- ness. By that time Sir John Franklin, 9 of his officers and 15 men had perished. Capt. Crozier succeeded to the chief command. Food supplies were rapidly nearing exhaustion and upon Capt. Crozier devolved the terrible neces- sity of abandoning the ship and endeavoring to save the crew by & desperate attempt to reach the nearest Hudson’s Bay Co. post, more than 450 miles to the southward. On April 22, 1848, the 105 survivors started for the mouth of the Great Fish River. They never reached it. Suffering from scurvy and dragging their unbelievably heavy sledges and boats behind them, they fought their way through the Arctic weather. It was too much for them. Before they had gone 80 miles it was necessary to set up a hospital tent. They bravely pushed on, but then, despairing of ever reaching civilization, the adventurers turned back to their ship. They had essayed the impossible and had failed. But death did not overtake them until they had achieved the main object of their voyage— the discovery of a channel of communication from Baffin Bay to Bering Strait. Thus did Franklin's volunteers realize the centuries-old dream of European navigators—the finding of a northwest passage. They were conquerors, even in death. 'HAT hard trail to the Scuth even today is strewn with relics of their heroic march. It is here that the fragments that plece together a bare solution of the mystery have been found «—the silver knives and forks, elaborately mark- ed with the crests of St. John and the others of the expedition; the heavy sledges and boats that proved too much for them to drag through the snow; bits of the brass-buttoned uniforms with which the members of the expedition were equipped; cairns which they built along the way; & brief record of the course of their boats and of the death of Sir John Pranklin; and, here and there, skeletons of the %ave adven- Courtesy of Kennedy & O& turers who died along the way and had to be left beh'nd. To this fragmentary story Burwash and Gil- bert have now written what may well be the last chapter. There seems little likelihood that new discoveries will bring a more complete solution of the Far North's greatest mystery. The abnormally hot Summer helped Bur- wash and Gilbert in their task. The drought which parched the cornfields of Iowa, the melon patches of Maryland and the wheat fields of Saskatchewan also melted the perren- nial snows that had kept skeletons, graves and relics of the Franklin expedition partly hidden for almost a century. It was a propitious year for wresting secrets from the ice-locked North. First, the bodies of Andree and his two companious were found at White Island. The abnormally mild weather and melting snow brought them and the diary of their expedition to light after more than 30 years of complete mystery. And along the coast of King William Land, into which Frank- lin and his men had disappeared half a cen- tury before Andree climbed into his balloon and sailed away for the North Pole, the ground was almost bare—the snow had melted there, too, uncovering hitherto undiscovered relics of the Franklin party. With chances of success so favorable, Maj. Burwash and his pilot set out on the most daring fi'ght in the history of Canadian avi- ation. For the first time in history the “blonde” Eskimos saw a plane in the vicinity of the North Magnetic Pole. True, Wilkins had flown over the top of the world from Point Barrow, and Byrd had pioneered in the vicinity of Ellesmere Land, but here were Burwash and his crew hovering above the Magnatic Pole itself. ‘The compass dipped sharply. Circling about, Gilbert headed the monoplane southwestward toward King Willlam Land. Above a freshe water lake he throitled his engine until the propeller was barely ticking over and brought the ship to a landing on the comparatively