total length of very inferior railways of about sixty miles. To suppose that our Ministry should have then contemplated the erection of the immense line of railway between the points above cited in a country so wild and uncultivated as those Turkish dependencies, is perhaps a method of giving those ministers credit for forethought almost superhuman; but certainly it is so absurd that it must ever remain a marvel how a reasonable man could utter such nonsense. To us it seems as wickedly absurd as to say, in the manner M. Arago does not hesitate to do, that the massacre at Djeddah and the revolt of the sepoys may be attributed to the persevering hostility of England to the scheme for uniting the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. Alas! we fear that M. Arago, with all his affectation of philosophy, is but an ignoble stirrer up of strife, and that his only object in writing about the destinies of humanity as affected by the state of affairs past, present, and to come in the East, has been to fan the rising flame of discord between the Germanic and the Latin races; for no man in his senses could possibly believe one tithe of the things this man utters. A quarrel is wanted by some of the adventurers who have, for their own ends, lately perilled the peace of Europe, and so any pretext will suffice, if a real one should not exist, an imaginary one must be made; and M. Arago has vigorously addressed himself to his task. The wolf never wanted advocates to prove that the lamb disturbed the stream! If we have dwelt upon the matters of detail connected with the asserted conduct of our Government in the negotiations for establishing communications between Western Europe and the East, it has not been for the reason that we attach more importance to the question they involve than we do to the other questions M. Arago raises upon the future destinies of our race, but simply because When men think clearly they express themselves intelligibly; but in this book they ape some grand metaphysical abstractions, which smack of the Hegelian jargon which is not fashionable at the Palais Royal. Thus, to talk about its being the proper and natural course of things that civilization should be diffused latitudinally instead of longitudinally; and that, therefore, England is the enemy of the human race because she, in conjunction with Austria and Turkey, instinctly prefers the longitudinal development instead of the latitudinal one which France is supposed to advocate, is to talk arrant nonsense. The duties of both France and of England are, we believe, to diffuse the blessings of civilization in every direction provided we can do so peaceably, and without violating the rights of the nations or tribes with which we come in contact. Unfortunately, neither France nor England are exempt from merited reproach on this score. Like the Abbé Michon, to whom allusion was made in our last number, M. Arago proposes that the Pope should be transferred to Jerusalem-by whom and at what cost? may we ask. Correctly read, M. Arago's remarks on the present of political affairs are even more bitterly satirical upon the existing Government of France than they are even upon the Machiavellis whom we picture in our Foreign-office. When will Frenchmen learn to look at home, and to address themselves to the removal of the beam from their own eye? Is the whole world not to be at peace in order that France may remain enslaved to the "idées" of certain titled rationalists in purely religious, and of certain despots in purely political affairs? If this be necessary, we can understand the forced quarrel such men as Antoine Arago seek with us; if not, books like the "Etudes sur le Role Politique state only in those parts of his use it is de la France" should be held up to which England is to be abused that ho condescends to talk intelligibly. universal reprobation. THE ECLECTIC. FEBRUARY, 1860. I. FATE OF SIR JOHN FRANKLIN, A Narrative of the Discovery of the Fate of Sir John Franklin and his Companions. By Captain M'CLINTOCK, R.N., LL.D. With Maps and Illustrations. London: Murray. 1859. pp. 402. THE dream of the merchant-adventurers of England for three centuries past has been the attainment, by a short passage of ice and storm, to the glories and gauds of an Eastern clime, its luxurious languor, and its luscious fruits-a dream never to be realised in the sense in which it played before the tricksy fancy. A fair Atlantis, a Sabbation of rest rose, rolled before the visions of these sons of thrift and toil; and, credulous as children to a fairy tale, they sought the summer clime, the waters that flowed silently, beyond the Polar Sea; but the very discovery of the passage has extinguished those olden and fantastic hopes. For three hundred years and upwards this dream was nevertheless the stimulant of hardy enterprise and unstinted expenditure-the earlier adventures being the outgrowth of private impulse, and not of national or royal patronage. A gallant set were they, and a hardy, who first coasted the region of Labrador, and pushed northward into the circle of perpetual frost-a race of whom England may well be proud, progenitors of the race not less daring and enduring, who in our own day have solved the problem, and rent the veil of the Arctic Isis, but with no mercantile or poetic results. Cabot, Hudson, Davies, Baffin, Thorne, Hore, Lok, Frobisher, Fotherbye, who can pronounce without the respect which courage and science inspire, associating them with Parry, Ross, Franklin, and the living heroes of the north-western enterprise ? The man that first looked off the deck of a "caravell" of twenty tons upon a sea and scene of boundless ice, and encountered its horrors, and traced its margin as far as he might, must have been a man with heart as sturdy as his native oak, and cased in a mail of threefold brass. This vision of barrenness and fear was quite unlike the fancies entertained of those "landes never knowen before," that cheered their launch from fair Bristowe, with promise of "spicerie," and "gold, rubies, diamonds, bolasses, granates, jacincts, and other stones, and pearles "-matters "pleasant to the eye and good for food." The dream is over and gone; VOL. III. I but the geographical problem is solved, and science and England and the whole human race is better for the fortitude, faith, and manhood that have signalized these Arctic expeditions from first to last. 66 66 Sebastian Cabot is the earliest voyager who ascertained for us the existence of these rugged climes, and traced the coast-line of America as far north as 67 degrees in 1497, drawing the inference, by reason of the sphere," that "by way of the north-west a shorter track into India might be found, and it is added that men became excited by this fame and report to attempt some notable thing." After him followed, in desultory succession, one and another the greater part of them in the eighteenth centuryincluding the names of Cook and Nelson, till at last the evidence of a water communication between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans growing yearly more demonstrative, our own century has pushed the enterprise to a proof. What Sir John Barrow, the father of modern Arctic discovery, asserted all along to be the Q.E.D. of northern geographical investigation, and affirmed to be practically ascertained that "the current which sets round the icy cape, after continuing along the northern coast of America, discharges itself through the Fury and Hecla Strait of Parry into the Atlantic," the course of events since Franklin's last expedition has confirmed, and settled for ever the fact that there is a water communication between the two oceans. But as all great enterprise is inaugurated with costly sacrifice, this grand exploration was not to be an exception to the rule-Sir John Franklin and Captain Crozier, in the Erebus and Terror with able officers and their picked crews, were to lay down their lives a holocaust on the altar of their country's glory and of the triumphs of science. These devoted and courageous men sailed from the Thames on the 26th of May, 1845, followed by the most sincere prayers for their success, and the most ardent aspirations for their safe return. The instructions given the expedition were singularly clear and forcible, indicating the very track in which the north-west passage has at last been found. Sir John Franklin was not sent on a wild-goose chase into the unlimited vastness of the icy seas, but was directed to confine his research to that part of Barrow's Strait southward and westward of Melville Island and Cape Walker, where actually at last M'Clure and Collinson found the problem solved, and the mystery of ages and genera tions cleared up. We direct you," say the instructions, "to this particular part of the Polar Sea, as affording the best prospect of accomplishing the passage to the Pacific." From 74 degrees north latitude and 98 west longitude the search was intended to begin west and south; and only when that region was traversed in quest of the missing crews were any substantial traces of the expedition found. Strange that hallucination should have so misled many an exploring venture before M'Clintock's, as to go almost anywhere rather than where his instructions bound Sir John Franklin to proceed. In this view the voyage of Kane up Smith's Inlet cannot be considered other than a great mistake; but it shares that characteristic with several others from our own country. The painful conclusion is forced upon us by the result of Captain M'Clintock's search, that the northern winds that sweep the pole might never have howled their dirges over our hapless countrymen in 1818, if the expeditions undertaken for their relief had pursued the only rational plan of making direct for the spot where the instructions of the Admiralty should have led the missing ships. Nothing could possibly have been more mismanaged than the whole scheme of rescue-the more strange when universal sympathy stimulated science to propose its most reliable plans, and a great empire to employ its inexhaustible resources to achieve the object in view. What remains for us, now that the disastrous end is known, is regret for the past, and a warning for the future; for there, where the earliest investigation should have been made, the miserable relics of the ill-starred expedition were found-an altar of sacrifice, not a trophy of success. Even yet, with all the light which these painful reliquiæ cast upon the history of Franklin's expedition, so marvellously well has the secret of the dysthanasia of these brave men been kept, that affection knows not where to weep, nor national regret on what shore to raise their sepulchre. We know that Sir John Franklin died on the 11th of June, 1847; but we know not where the funeral honours were accorded him "Pulveris exigui parva munera." That he was interred on shore we take for granted, unless, indeed, his remains were preserved in spirits for transmission to England with the return of the vessels. A very inadequate search has hitherto been made into this as well as into other matters of far more serious import. How did they perish? Where did they perish? Do any still survive?"are questions answerless and yet incessant." Neither tide of ocean nor breeze of land has whispered the thrilling taleneither apocryphal Esquimaux nor dubious interpreter-neither credulous whaler nor intelligent expeditionist, in such accents as command belief. No clue has yet been furnished to the remains of the dead, and no anodyne applied to the anxieties of the living. It is scarcely too loud a reproach to vent against all the expensive and well-founded exploratory expeditions sent out from this country, from 1847 to the very last, to cite the impassioned inquiry of Campbell: "O star-eyed science! hast thou wandered there Among the expeditions sent out in search of the missing navigators, none is so interesting, previous to M'Clintock's, from the magnitude of its results, as that of Captain M'Clure, because it at once and for ever opened the knot of the Arctic transit puzzle, and laid curiosity to rest. This distinguished and enterprising sailor, in the Investigator, and Captain Collinson, in the Enterprise, made their entrance into the Arctic basin by the Gate of Behring's Straits, aiming to effect a junction eastward with the other expeditions that had reached the Arctic circle by Baffin's Bay and Lancaster Sound, hoping to hear tidings of Franklin and his party, should that ill-fated sailor have succeeded in driving his ship through the ice south and west of Cape Walker. On the look-out for Franklin's missing party, the ships of this expedition seized every opportunity of intercourse with the Esquimaux, when casual parties of that singularly dirty and disagreeable people fell in the way. The expectations of the party often shaped the inferences they drew from matters of observation or suspicion amongst the natives. For instance, if a person fairer than another appears among them on shore, the person who examines the group with a telescope from the deck pronounces him a European. Anything in the shape of a mound is directly supposed to be a foreigner's grave, and any signal post, of which there are many, the erection of the lost men. These fancies shaped the vision, and deluded the hope of the crew on more than one occasion; but it is now certain, from all that has transpired within the last two years with the Fox, that the Franklin expedition, neither by sea nor land, ever reached this region at all, and can only be tracked in longitudes further east. The Esquimaux encountered by the successive voyagers to the Arctic regions, were marked by the usual characteristics of that unattractive race of men. They chewed the cud and divided the hoof, yet were they indubitably classifiable with unclean animals. That "cleanliness is next to goodliness" was a wise saw which had never reached so high a latitude as theirs. They suffered as a nation from a uniform complaint-hydrophobia. They had no faith in the water-cure. Anabaptism could never succeed among them. Death before immersion would have been their cry of despair. Their unsavoury savour was that of a midden in midsummer-to rub noses with them was perpetual assafoetida. All the comparisons wherewith you would compare them were, in Mrs. Malaprop's phrase, literally "odorous." Had we been there we should have preferred them anywhere except between the wind and our nobility. The offence of their nastiness was rank-it smelled to heaven! Human pachyderms, their skin was crass with dirt; to make them extemporaneous birds they needed only feathers, for they were tarred already with grime. They were the poetry of filthiness and foetor -the ne plus ultra of human disregard of the decencies. Only hyperborean noses and nerves could bear a daily association with a people of such a high celestial flavour as this; for ordinary mortals this ammonian relish were over high "For human nature's daily food." Mr. McDougall, in his extremely interesting and business-like journal, declares that they "outvied all he had previously seen in want of cleanliness, and were, without exception, the most |