The disasters of 1853-54 cast a deeper gloom than ever over the search for Franklin. Moreover, the rising clouds in the East and presently the outbreak of the Crimean War prevented further efforts. Ships and men were needed elsewhere than in the northern seas. It began to look as if failure was now final, and that nothing more could be done. Following naval precedent, a court-martial had been held to investigate the action of Captain Sir Edward Belcher. 'The solemn silence,' wrote Captain M'Clure afterwards, 'with which the venerable president of the court returned Captain Belcher his sword, with a bare acquittal, best conveyed the painful feelings which wrung the hearts of all professional men upon that occasion; and all felt that there was no hope of the mystery of Franklin's fate being cleared up in our time except by some unexpected miracle.' The unexpected happened. Strangely enough, {127} it was just at this juncture that a letter sent by Dr John Rae from the Hudson Bay country brought to England the first authentic news of the fate of Franklin's men. Rae had been sent overland from the north-west shores of Hudson Bay to the coast of the Arctic at the point where the Back or Great Fish river runs in a wide estuary to the sea. He had wintered on the isthmus (now called after him) which separates Regent's Inlet from Repulse Bay, and in the spring of 1854 had gone westward with sledges towards the mouth of the Back. On his way he fell in with Eskimos, who told him that several years before a party of about forty white men had been seen hauling a boat and sledges over the ice. This was on the west side of the island called King William's Land. None of the men, so the savages said, could speak to them in their own language; but they made signs to show that they had lost their ships, and that they were trying to make their way to where deer could be found. All the men looked thin, and the Eskimos thought they had very little food. They had bought some seal's flesh from the savages. They hauled their sledges and the boat along with drag-ropes, at which all were tugging except one very tall big man, who seemed to be a chief and {128} walked by himself. Later on in the same season, so the Eskimos said, they had found the bodies of a lot of men lying on the ice, and had seen some graves and five dead bodies on an island at the mouth of a river. Some of the bodies were lying in tents. The big boat had been turned over as if to make a shelter, and under it were dead men. One that lay on the island was the body of the chief; he had a telescope strapped over his shoulders, and his gun lay underneath him. The savages told Dr Rae that they thought that the last survivors of the white men must have been feeding on the dead bodies, as some of these were hacked and mutilated and there was flesh in the kettles. There were signs that some of the party might have escaped; for on the ground there were