also owed many of our books, night-signals, instruments, and the timber
for our sledges.

The commander of the 'Eothen' was, indirectly, the originator of
the expedition. Everybody knows that for more than twenty years
explorers had been sailing from English and American ports in search of
the bodies or the papers of Sir John Franklin and his party. The
partial success which attended the investigations of Sir Leopold
McClintock had served to whet the public appetite. A story which
Captain Barry brought home from the Arctic made the curiosity still
greater. He said that in 1871-73, while on a whaling expedition, he was
frozen in with the 'Glacier' in Repulse Bay, and was there visited
by several Esquimaux who brought their families on board his vessel.
They had lost their way while hunting, and were anxious to see the
ships of white men. While on board the 'Glacier' they spoke of a
stranger in uniform who had visited them some years before, and who was
accompanied by many other white men. All of the party had afterward
died, but the chief had meanwhile collected a great quantity of papers.
He had left these papers behind him in a cairn, where, among other
things, some silver spoons had since been found. In the winter of 1876,
while the captain was with the bark 'A. Houghton' before Marble
Island, another set of Esquimaux visited him, and while looking at his
logbook said that the great white man who had been among them many
years before had kept a similar book, and having told him this one of
them gave him a spoon engraved with the word "Franklin."

This was enough to arrest the attention and stir the adventurous spirit
of Lieutenant Schwatka. He became eager to organize a search party and
find the cairn where the papers were supposed to be still buried. He
obtained leave of absence, went to New York, and proposed to Judge