These spoons and forks, it may be mentioned, bore the crests and initials of some fifteen members of the expedition. So far as Rae could discover, the natives had seen no traces whatever of the ships, and whenever they were questioned about them, they always reverted to the _Victory_, which was abandoned by Ross in the Gulf of Boothia in 1832. “My chief reason,” he writes, “for believing that none of the ships had been found was the fact that, in 1854, the Eskimos were so destitute of wood, that, although they had plenty of sealskins to make their small hunting canoes, they had no wood for the frames. Now, as 1846 was fourteen years after Ross’s vessel was abandoned, and as 1854 was only four years by Eskimo account—actually six years—after the Franklin ships were abandoned, the probability is that had these ships, or even one of them, been found, the natives would have had at least as much wood in 1854 as they had in 1847. The testimony of the _Fox_ expedition of 1854 tends to support this idea, as no large wooden sledges were found, and no wood of a size larger than might have been got from the keel of a boat was seen.... I questioned the Repulse Bay Eskimos over and over again about whether any of the ships of the starved white men had been found, but they could tell me nothing, and always went back to the story of the _Victory_, stating that it was the only vessel from which wood had been obtained. I still believe that this was the ship to which the Eskimos referred when speaking to M’Clintock in 1859, and that they concealed the locality of the wreck lest he should wish to go there.... I may add that the white men when seen alive by the Eskimos made the latter understand by signs and a word or two of Eskimo, that they were going to the mainland (noo-nah) to shoot deer (took-took).... The Eskimos also remarked that it was curious that the sledges were seen with the party when travelling, but none were seen where the dead were, although the boat or boats remained. I pointed out to them that the white men having got close to the mouth of the Great Fish River, would require their boat to go up it, but as they did not require the sledges any more, they might have burned them for fuel. A look of intelligence immediately lit up their faces, and they said that they might have done so, for there had been fires.... They said also that feathers of geese had been seen, so they had probably shot some of these birds—an evidence that some of the party must have lived until the beginning of June, the date at which the geese arrive so far north.... What struck me at the time, as it does still, was the great mistake made by Franklin’s party in attempting to save themselves by retreating to the Hudson’s Bay territories. We should have thought that the fearful sufferings undergone by Franklin and his companions, Richardson and Back, on a former short journey through these barren grounds, would have