[Illustration:  “THEY FELL DOWN AND DIED AS THEY WALKED”]

The full story—­at once sorrowful and stimulating—­of Arctic exploration, can not be told here.  That would require volumes rather than a single chapter.  Even the part played in it by Americans can be sketched in outline only.  But it is worth remembering that the systematic attack of our countrymen upon the Arctic fortress, began with an unselfish and humane incentive.  In 1845 Sir John Franklin, a gallant English seaman, had set sail with two stout ships and 125 men, to seek the Northwest Passage.  Thereafter no word was heard from him, until, years later, a searching party found a cairn of stones on a desolate, ice-bound headland, and in it a faintly written record, which told of the death of Sir John and twenty-four of his associates.  We know now, that all who set out on this ill-fated expedition, perished.  Struggling to the southward after abandoning their ships, they fell one by one, and their lives ebbed away on the cruel ice.  “They fell down and died as they walked,” said an old Esquimau woman to Lieutenant McClintock, of the British navy, who sought for tidings of them, and, indeed, her report found sorrowful verification in the skeletons discovered years afterward, lying face downward in the snow.  To the last man they died.  Think of the state of that last man—­alone in the frozen wilderness!  An eloquent writer, the correspondent McGahan, himself no stranger to Arctic pains and perils, has imagined that pitiful picture thus: 

“One sees this man after the death of his last remaining companion, all alone in that terrible world, gazing round him in mute despair, the sole, living thing in that dark frozen universe.  The sky is somber, the earth whitened with a glittering whiteness that chills the heart.  His clothing is covered with frozen snow, his face lean and haggard, his beard a cluster of icicles.  The setting sun looks back to see the last victim die.  He meets her sinister gaze with a steady eye, as though bidding her defiance.  For a few minutes they glare at each other, then the curtain is drawn, and all is dark.”

As fears for Franklin’s safety deepened into certainty of his loss with the passage of months and years, a multitude of searching expeditions were sent out, the earlier ones in the hope of rescuing him; the later ones with the purpose of discovering the records of his voyage, which all felt sure must have been cached at some accessible point.  Americans took an active—­almost a leading—­part in these expeditions, braving in them the same perils which had overcome the stout English knight.  By sea and by land they sought him.  The story of the land expeditions, though full of interest, is foreign to the purpose of this work, and must be passed over with the mere note that Charles F. Hall, a Cincinnati journalist, in 1868-69, and Lieutenant Schwatka, and W.H.  Gilder in 1878-79 fought their way northward to the path followed by the English explorer, found