Anthony Brandt is the author of two previous books, and the editor of the Adventure Classics series published by National Geographic Society Press. He is also the books editor at National Geographic Adventure magazine and was previously the book critic for Men’s Journal. His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Esquire among many other magazines. He lives in Sag Harbor, New York.
Dozens of missions set out for the Arctic during the first half of the nineteenth century; all ended in failure and many in disaster, as men found themselves starving to death in the freezing wilderness, sometimes with nothing left to eat but their companions’ remains. Anthony Brandt traces the complete history of this noble and foolhardy obsession, which originated during the sixteenth century, bringing vividly to life this record of courage and incompetence, privation and endurance, heroics and tragedy. Along the way he introduces us to an expansive cast of fascinating characters: seamen and landlubbers, scientists and politicians, sceptics and tireless believers.
The Man Who Ate His Boots is a rich and engaging work of narrative history – a multifaceted portrait of noble adventure and of imperialistic folly.
The staff of the rare book division of Butler Library at Columbia University in New York, which has a remarkably comprehensive collection of Arctic books, pamphlets, and British government documents, was unfailingly polite and helpful, and I want to thank them. The rare-book staff at the New York Public Library research division on Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street was also helpful.
Particular friends were not only encouraging throughout this project but helpful in a material way. I want to thank Philip Spitzer, my agent and my friend, and his wife, Mary, for help and support throughout the project, not least for the use of their apartment when they were gone. I owe a similar debt to friends Lynn Langway and Jerry Edgerton, and Anne-Lise Spitzer, for the use of their apartments. I am deeply grateful to Ken Robbins for his help with reproductions of photographs and maps and for years of friendship. Thomas Harris, Pace Barnes, and Alexandra Leigh-Hunt got me through a number of crises and have been nothing but supportive throughout the three years it took me to write this book. All of these people are very dear to me. I don’t know how I would have finished the book without them.
I owe many thanks to John Rasmus, editor of National Geographic Adventure magazine, and to his longtime associate, Steve Byers, my editor there, for their loyalty and encouragement. At the National Geographic Society, Lisa Thomas and Kevin Mulroy were very helpful. It is through them that I came to know about the long struggle for the Northwest Passage and John Franklin’s role in it. My editor at Knopf, Andrew Miller, has been unusually patient and, through his close attention to the text, has saved me from numerous mistakes of emphasis and tone and helped me focus the book more tightly. I feel lucky to have him.
My wife, the writer Lorraine Dusky, knows better than anybody what it took to write this book. It is a pleasure to dedicate it to her.
[Anonymous.] “Scrutator.” The Impracticability of a North-West Passage for Ships, Impartially Considered. London, 1824.
Back, George. Narrative of the Arctic Land Expedition to the Mouth of the Great Fish River … in the Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. 1836; reprint Elibron Classics, 2005.
———. Narrative of the Arctic Land Expedition in H.M.S. Terror. London: John Murray, 1838.
———. Arctic Artist: The Journal and Paintings of George Back, Midshipman with Franklin, 1819–1822. Edited by C. Stuart Houston. Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1994.
Beechey, F. W. Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific and Beering’s Strait to Co-operate with the Polar Expeditions … in the Years 1825, 26, 27, 28. 2 vols. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831.
———. A Voyage of Discovery towards the North Pole. London: Richard Bentley, 1843.
Bellot, Joseph René. Memoirs of Lieutenant Joseph René Bellot, … With His Journal of a Voyage in the Polar Seas, in Search of Sir John Franklin. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1855.
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Fisher, Alexander. Journal of a Voyage of Discovery to the Arctic Regions … in his Majesty’s Ship Alexander. London: Richard Phillips, n.d. [1819].
———. Journal of a Voyage of Discovery to the Arctic in His Majesty’s Ships Hecla and Griper in the Years 1819 and 1820. London: Longman, Hurst, 1821.
Fitzjames, James. The Last Journals of Captain Fitzjames of the Lost Polar Expedition. Edited by William Coningham. Brighton, U.K.: W. Pearce, n.d. [1859].
Franklin, John. Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea in the Years 1819, 20, 21, and 22. 1823; reprint Edmonton: M. G. Hurtig, 1969.
———. Narrative of a Second Expedition to the Shores of the Polar Sea in the Years 1825, 1826, and 1827. 1828; reprint New York: Greenwood Press, 1969.
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Kennedy, William. A Short Narrative of the Second Voyage of the Prince Albert in Search of Sir John Franklin. London: W. H. Dalton, 1853.
King, Richard. Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Arctic Ocean, in 1833, 1834, and 1835; under the Command of Capt. Back, R.N. 2 vols. London: Richard Bentley, 1836.
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Lyon, George F. The Private Journal of Captain G. F. Lyon During the Recent Voyage of Discovery Under Captain Parry, 1821–1823. Barre, Mass.: Imprint Society, 1970.
———. A Brief Narrative of an Unsuccessful Attempt to Reach Repulse Bay Through Sir Thomas Rowe’s “Welcome” in His Majesty’s Ship Griper in the Year MDCCCXXIV. 1825; reprint Toronto: Coles, 1971.
Masson, L. R., ed. Les Bourgeois de la Compagnie du Nord-Ouest, vol. 1. New York: Antiquarian Press, 1960.
McClintock, Francis L. The Voyage of the ‘Fox’ in the Arctic Seas: A Narrative of the Discovery of the Fate of Sir John Franklin and His Companions. New York: J. T. Lloyd, 1859.
McClure, Robert L. M. The Discovery of the North-West Passage. Edited by Sherard Osborn. Rutland, Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1969.
Miertsching, Johann. Frozen Ships: The Arctic Diary of Johann Miertsching, 1850–1854. Translated and edited by L. H. Neatby. Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1967.
Osborn, Sherard. Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; or, Eighteen Months in the Polar Regions, in Search of Sir John Franklin’s Expedition in the Years 1850–51. New York: George P. Putnam, 1852.
Parry, William Edward, Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific; Performed in the Years 1819–20, etc. 1821; reprint New York: Greenwood Press, 1968.
———. Journal of a Second Voyage for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific; Performed in the Years 1821–22–23, in His Majesty’s Ships Fury and Hecla. 1824; reprint New York: Greenwood Press, 1969.
———. Journal of a Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific … in 1824–25. Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1826.
———. Narrative of an Attempt to Reach the North Pole. London: John Murray, 1828.
Peard, George. To the Pacific and Arctic with Beechey: The Journal of Lieutenant George Peard of H.M.S. “Blossom,” 1825–1828. Cambridge, U.K.: Hakluyt Society, 1973.
Pullen, H. F., ed. The Pullen Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin. Toronto: Arctic History Press, 1979.
Rae, John. John Rae’s Correspondence with the Hudson’s Bay Company on Arctic Exploration, 1844–1855. Edited by E. E. Rich. London: Hudson’s Bay Company Record Society, 1953.
Richardson, John. Arctic Searching Expedition. 2 vols. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longman’s, 1851.
———. Arctic Ordeal: The Journal of John Richardson, Surgeon-Naturalist with Franklin, 1820–1822. Edited by C. Stuart Houston. Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1984.
Ross, John. A Voyage of Discovery, Made Under the Orders of the Admiralty, in His Majesty’s Ships Isabella and Alexander, for the Purpose of Exploring Baffin’s Bay, and Inquiring into the Probability of a North-West Passage. London: John Murray, 1819.
———. An Explanation of Captain Sabine’s Remarks on the Late Voyage of Discovery to Baffin’s Bay. London: John Murray, 1819.
———. A Letter to John Barrow, Esq. F.R.S. on the Late Extraordinary and Unexpected Hyperborean Discoveries. London: W. Pople, 1826.
———. Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a North-West Passage, and of a Residence in the Arctic Regions During the Years 1829, 1830, 1831, 1832, 1833. 1835; reprint New York: Greenwood Press, 1969.
Ross, W. Gillies. Arctic Whalers, Icy Seas: Narratives of the Davis Strait Whale Fishery. Toronto: Irwin, 1985.
Sabine, Edward. Remarks on the Account of the Late Voyage of Discovery to Baffin’s Bay, Published by Captain John Ross, R. N., 3rd ed. London: John Booth, 1819.
Schwatka, Frederick. The Long Arctic Search: The Narrative of Lt. Frederick Schwatka, U.S.A., 1878–1880, Seeking the Records of the Lost Franklin Expedition. Edited by Edouard A. Stackpole. Chester, Conn.: Mystic Seaport, 1977.
Simpson, George. Journal of Occurrences in the Athabasca Department by George Simpson, 1820 and 1821, and Report. Edited by E. E. Rich. Toronto: Champlain Society, 1938.
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Woodman, David C. Unravelling the Franklin Mystery: Inuit Testimony. Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 1991.
Woodward, Frances J. Portrait of Jane: A Life of Lady Franklin. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1951.
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ARTICLES
Borgerson, Scott. “Sea Change.” Atlantic (November 2008).
Cawood, John. “The Magnetic Crusade: Science and Politics in Early Victorian Britain.” Isis 70 (1979): 493–518.
Davis, Richard C. “History or His/Story?: The Explorer cum Author.” Studies in Canadian Literature 16 (1991): 93–111.
———. “‘Which an Affectionate Heart Would Say’: John Franklin’s Personal Correspondence, 1819–1824.” Polar Record 33 (July 1997): 189–212.
Funk, McKenzie. “Cold Rush: The Coming Fight for the Melting North.” Harper’s (September 2007), pp. 45–55.
Keenleyside, Anne. “Final Days of the Franklin Expedition: New Skeletal Evidence.” Arctic 50 (1997): 36–46.
MacLaren, I. S. “… where nothing moves and nothing changes.” Dalhousie Review 62 (1982): 485–94.
Macleod, Margaret Arnett, and Richard Glover. “Franklin’s First Expedition as Seen by the Fur Traders.” Polar Record 15 (1971): 669–82.
Marlow, James F. “The Fate of Sir John Franklin: Three Phases of Response in Victorian Periodicals,” Victorian Periodicals Review 15 (Spring 1982): 3–11.
Ross, W. Gillies. “The Gloucester Balloon: A Communication from Franklin?” Polar Record 38 (2002): 11–22.
———. “Clairvoyants and Mediums Search for Franklin.” Polar Record 39 (2003): 1–18.
———. “False Leads in the Franklin Search.” Polar Record 39 (2003): 131–60.
———. “The Admiralty and the Franklin Search.” Polar Record 40 (2004): 289–301.
———. “The Arctic Council of 1851: Fact or Fancy?” Polar Record 40 (2004): 135–41.
Russell, Penny. “Wife Stories: Narrating Marriage and Self in the Life of Jane Franklin.” Victorian Studies 48, no. 1 (2005): 35–57.
Stone, Ian R. “‘The contents of the kettles’: Charles Dickens, John Rae and Cannibalism on the 1845 Franklin Expedition.” Dickensian 83 (1987): 6–16.
———. “The Franklin Search in Parliament.” Polar Record 32 (1996): 209–16.
THE FOUR SHIPS cast off one by one from their moorings in the new canal connecting the maze of Royal Navy docks at Deptford, just below London, with the Thames, and moved toward the river and the beginning of their journeys. It was mid-morning, April 4, 1818, and a crowd had gathered to cheer them on. With the tide on the ebb, however, two of the ships, the Trent and the Alexander, did not reach the canal gates before they closed and were forced to lay over one more night. This gave still more “parties of ladies and gentlemen,” as Alexander Fisher, assistant surgeon on the Alexander, described them, a chance to come aboard to wish them well and say good-bye.
Parties of ladies and gentlemen had in fact been visiting the four ships for weeks, sending their visiting cards below to the officers, asking to be led on a tour. Lieutenant John Franklin wrote his sister, “It would be quite impossible for me to convey to you the amazing interest our little squadron has excited. Deptford has been covered with carriages and the ships with visitors every day since they were in a state to be seen.” Franklin had as a result been introduced to a great many people, “some of them persons of considerable rank and all men of scientific eminence.” The Duke of Clarence, King George III’s youngest son and later King William IV, who had served his own apprenticeship in the Royal Navy, paid an official visit to see them off. We do not know if he met them then, but among the people who visited the ships were the two women who would later become Franklin’s first and second wives. The expedition had aroused a great deal of excitement in England. The visitors “all appeared,” Alexander Fisher remarked, “to be as much interested in the success of our undertaking, as we could possibly be ourselves; but, by way of comfort,” he added, “they frequently expressed their concern for our safety in such a hazardous enterprise.”
Hazardous indeed. All four ships were on their way to the Arctic.
They were not heading, however, to the same region. The Dorothea and the Trent, under the overall command of Captain David Buchan, R.N., with Lieutenant Franklin in command of the latter, the smaller of the two ships, were bound to Svalbard, then called Spitzbergen, an archipelago lying a few hundred miles to the east of Greenland about fifteen degrees north of the Arctic Circle. Their mission was to test the theory, widely credited at the time, that the Arctic Ocean was in fact not frozen except around its edges. Within its tonsure of ice it was an open sea and it ought to be possible, if the theory were correct, to penetrate this frozen rim and sail to the Pacific over the top of the earth, right across the North Pole, cutting thousands of miles off the usual routes around Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope.
The other two ships, the Isabella and the Alexander, had orders to sail to Baffin Bay to search for the entrance to the Northwest Passage. If they found it they were to go on through the Passage, wintering over if necessary in some sheltered spot on the northern coast of Canada, then proceed to the Hawaiian Islands. They had supplies on board for twenty-eight “lunar months” (a little over two years), enough canvas to cover the decks with a tent if winter caught them in the ice, plenty of warm clothing, a surgeon and his assistant on each ship. They also carried trade goods for the natives that included, among the brass kettles, 350 yards of red, yellow, and blue flannels, butcher’s knives, scissors, two hundred mirrors, cutlasses, thread, snuff, gin, and brandy in abundance, no fewer than forty umbrellas.
One native was already aboard, an Inuit from southern Greenland, John Sacheuse, who had been saved by an English whaling ship in a storm, come to live in England, learned the language, and converted to Christianity. Sacheuse had volunteered to join the expedition because the southern Greenland Inuit believed that a lost tribe of Inuit lived in the far north of Greenland, an area no ship had approached since William Baffin, who had sailed around the perimeter of the bay named after him two hundred years earlier. Sacheuse said that he hoped to find them and convert them to Christianity.
Of the first expedition, under Buchan, there is not much to say. The Admiralty, the Royal Navy’s administrative arm, normally required commanders to publish accounts of exploring expeditions, but this one had little worth recording, and no account of it appeared until 1843. Like the expedition to Baffin Bay, it was prompted by the fact that in the summer of 1817 the seas around eastern Greenland had unexpectedly cleared of ice. Under normal circumstances it was impossible to sail close enough to the eastern shores of Greenland above seventy-five degrees north latitude even to see land. These conditions had prevailed for four centuries. During all that time some eighteen thousand square miles of ice had barred all access to the east coast of Greenland from its southern tip all the way to the top of the island, the edge of this ice shelf describing a great arc stretching north by east, trending away from Greenland toward the coast of Spitzbergen. This ice was old, thick, and impenetrable. Nobody had landed on the eastern coast of Greenland since the Middle Ages. There were rumors that Danish colonists had settled there then. Nobody knew, if that were true, whether their descendants had survived.
Then in the summer of 1817 the whalers who hunted in the seas around Spitzbergen noticed that this ice had simply vanished. Pack ice still lay above Spitzbergen but to the west and south of it, along the Greenland coast, it was gone. William Scoresby, Jr., who regularly hunted whales in these waters but was as much a scientist as a whaler, made the fact of the ice’s disappearance known through the newspapers. Sir Joseph Banks, the longtime president of the Royal Society, England’s premier scientific organization, promptly wrote him and asked for details. Banks and Scoresby already knew each other. Banks made it a point to know everyone in Great Britain with serious scientific interests. Scoresby’s father, a whaler himself, had once given Lady Banks polar bear skins, which she used in the winter, Banks told Scoresby, “to her great comfort.” Scoresby replied that the ice had indeed broken up and drifted away to oblivion, that he had been able to sail along the east coast of Greenland and could have landed, and that this had never happened before in the memory of anyone living. Banks forwarded Scoresby’s letter to John Barrow, the second secretary of the Admiralty, and suggested that this could be the time to pursue exploration in the Arctic. With ice conditions having changed so radically off east Greenland, it stood to reason that the ice above Spitzbergen had also thinned out, even the ice elsewhere in the Far North. The rim of ice, if that was all it was, that had protected the high Arctic from the eyes of humankind through all of previous history might be penetrable. This then could be the moment when explorers, English explorers, finally discovered that great foggy shortcut to the Orient, the Northwest Passage, or perhaps even reached the North Pole. The Dorothea and the Trent, like the Isabella and the Alexander, had provisions for two years, but if the polar seas were indeed open, neither expedition would need them. Hawaii might lie only a couple of months away. There umbrellas might come in handy as trade goods after all.
Of course no one had actually seen this polar sea or knew for certain that it existed. All that blank space at the top of the globe could very well be solid land. Greenland might extend all the way to the northern coast of Asia, as some mapmakers speculated. There was evidence for a northern water route of some kind between the Atlantic and the Pacific, but it was not decisive. A whaler had found a sawn mahogany plank near Disco Island, which lies off the west coast of Greenland; huge mahogany tree trunks had also been found. Mahogany is tropical in origin and these pieces of wood might, speculation ran at the time, have been borne up the west coast of North America through Bering Strait and across the top of the continent through unknown straits—through the Northwest Passage—to Greenland. This drift of ten thousand miles would have required ocean currents that followed that particular route. A current was known to run north through Bering Strait. Another ran south down Baffin Bay, taking the ice with it every summer. (The iceberg that sank the Titanic in 1912 was carried south from Baffin Bay on this current.) Conceivably these two currents were one and the same.
Whales also seemed to know the way across the top of North America. Whalers talked of finding harpoons in the native Greenland style in the bodies of whales caught in the Pacific Ocean, and vice versa: “Whales with stone lances sticking in their fat, (a kind of weapon used by no nation now known),” wrote Scoresby, had been found in the bodies of whales killed off Spitzbergen and in Davis Strait. But what route the whales used was anybody’s guess. Above eighty degrees of north latitude, everything was white space on the map of the earth. In other parts of the Arctic the geography well below eighty degrees was equally mysterious. Samuel Hearne and Alexander Mackenzie, exploring in northern Canada for the fur companies, had reached the mouths of the Coppermine and Mackenzie Rivers in 1771 and 1789, respectively—both rivers empty into the Arctic Ocean—and found open sea, but their accounts were not entirely clear about exactly how much of this sea they had seen, and no other white man had ever been to the coast of northern Canada in any other part of the continent.
As for Baffin Bay, no one had been to its northern reaches since William Baffin himself in 1616, and his maps had vanished when Samuel Purchas, who first printed Baffin’s account of the voyage, decided he could not afford to print the maps and stored them away, to be forever lost. So there was nothing to go on but Baffin’s verbal description of what he saw and his latitude readings. The whalers operating in Davis Strait, south of Baffin Bay, never sailed north of about seventy-one degrees north latitude. The head of Baffin Bay lies 550 miles to the north of that. A few geographers doubted that Baffin Island existed, doubted indeed that Baffin had even sailed where he claimed he had sailed. And if Baffin Island did exist, no one knew what waited for the first explorers who might find a passage through it.
Not that the speculative geographers of the time didn’t have ideas about what the Arctic contained. In some Renaissance maps the North Pole turns up as an actual protuberance (the Inuit, when it was explained to them what the North Pole was, came to call it the Big Nail), a great pyramid or mountain of iron, the iron explaining why magnets point north. Other early maps showed a Strait of Anián north of North America, sometimes through it, that connected the Atlantic and the Pacific. The idea for this strait seems to have come from the writings of Marco Polo; it first appeared on an influential map drawn in 1566. Thereafter it became a fixture on maps of North America and its environs.
But by 1818 the Strait of Anián had vanished from the maps. John Barrow, second secretary of the Admiralty, in his Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic Regions, published that year, mentions the strait and Spanish attempts to find it in the sixteenth century, but his map of the Arctic does not show it, does not in fact indulge in any untoward speculation about what might exist in these unexplored areas of the globe. The east coast of Greenland, where the ice had slipped away so unexpectedly the previous year, trails away on Barrow’s map into nothingness just before it reaches eighty degrees north. The west coast of Greenland, which forms the eastern shore of Baffin Bay, vanishes at a point well south of eighty degrees. Barrow was one of those who did not believe Baffin Island existed. He called the southern half of what we now know as Baffin Island by another name, Cumberland Island. It does not extend on his map above that known southern half. Spitzbergen appears on his map, but north of it is only white space. In Alaska the coast east of Icy Cape, which Captain Cook had discovered and named on his third voyage in 1778 when he was trying to find the western outlet of the Northwest Passage, is a dotted line to the Mackenzie River, hundreds of miles away. The two expeditions sailing from London that April day were hammering at the unknown.
In Spitzbergen the hammer nearly broke on the ice. Buchan and his two ships, the Dorothea and the Trent, reached the island in June, where he found that ice conditions had returned to normal. The east coast of Greenland was once again unapproachable. The sea above and to the west of Spitzbergen was frozen solid. The two ships took refuge in Magdalena Bay on the west coast of Spitzbergen and were promptly frozen in, unable to move for several weeks. One day a few men decided to walk across the ice toward shore, three or four miles away, only to have a sudden fog envelop them when they were halfway across. Nothing is so dense, or so common, as an Arctic fog. Arctic fog will turn the man walking next to you into a vague gray form; the man next to him will disappear. They turned around to retrace their steps, but the floes they had crossed, and therefore their own tracks across them, were spinning slowly in the currents, making it impossible for them to determine what direction they had actually come from. They fired their muskets, hoping somebody on the ships would hear them and fire back, letting them know where the ships were. The men on the ships did fire back, but the fog must have swallowed the sound. Any one of the floes they were standing on might at any time break free and drift away. Finally two men still on board ship volunteered to venture out on the ice and try to find them. Luckily they did. This adventure lasted eighteen hours. The men on the ice had no shelter of any kind. Another eighteen hours and it is doubtful any of them would have lived.
The Arctic is full of this kind of danger. Storms come up quickly, without warning. Mist freezes on ropes and sails and makes them too stiff to manage. Fog can last for days, for a week, two weeks. Ice floes six, eight, ten feet or more thick and two or three square miles in area drive implacably on ships. Ice can wedge a ship right out of the water. The animals can be dangerous. Polar bears will attack people, drag them off, and eat them. A group of angry walrus attacked one of the ship’s boats off Spitzbergen, lunging over the sides at the men inside, and nearly capsized it.
After the ice broke up, the two ships left Magdalena Bay and headed north to try their luck in the pack, to see if it was in fact only the frozen edge of a liquid polar sea, a white crown circling gray waters. Following narrow leads of open water in the ice that appeared, then disappeared, the crew walked on the ice down these leads, hauling the ships with ropes, by hand; they found themselves in early July locked into the pack some thirty miles from the edge of it, unable to go on. The leads had vanished, the pack closed up. They had achieved a latitude of eighty degrees and change, as far north as any human being except William Scoresby and his father had ever sailed. From their mastheads they could see nothing but ice to the north, stretching to the horizon. Then the weather suddenly turned cold. It took them nine days, working night and day, for the sun never sets in the Arctic in July, to make it out of the pack back to the open waters around Spitzbergen.
As soon as the ice released them, a sudden storm came up from the southwest, forcing them back against the pack. Now their situation was truly desperate. If they could not stand off from the pack, and they could not, the ships would be pushed broadside by the wind and waves into the violent chaos at the leading edge of the pack, where huge broken floes tossed in the heaving water and smashed into each other with enormous force. That level of battering would have turned the Dorothea and the Trent into driftwood. They had only one chance to survive, and that was to sail back with the storm through the chaos and try to find refuge in the pack, an opening, a lead, a cove of ice where the conditions were not quite as hopeless. It was as risky a maneuver as sailing ships could try in an Arctic storm, but they made it. These were men of high courage; most of them had seen service in the Napoleonic Wars.
The storm died down as quickly as it had come up. The Dorothea was so heavily damaged, however, that it could not proceed. John Franklin, commanding the Trentintrepid