said he, pouting his lip, as he was wont to do when agitated, ‘I wished to kill the bear that I might carry the skin to my father.’” [Illustration: THE “RACEHORSE” AND THE “CARCASE” IN THE ICE FROM A PICTURE BY J. CLIVELY] It was three years after the return of the _Racehorse_ and _Carcase_ that Captain Cook made his only expedition into the Arctic seas. His success in the Antarctic had led his friends in England to hope great things of his voyage through the Bering Strait, but, unfortunately, his two ships, the _Resolution_ and the _Discovery_, proved but ill-adapted for service in the Arctic, and though he succeeded in charting a good deal of the unknown American coast, he made no approach to finding that North-West Passage for the discovery of which he had been set out. He had intended to return to the Arctic again with a view to prosecuting his discoveries there, but his death at Hawaii in 1779 prevented him from fulfilling his purpose, and his second in command, Captain Clerke, on whom the leadership of the expedition devolved, died of consumption at Petropaulovsk. CHAPTER III THE VOYAGE OF BUCHAN AND FRANKLIN What with the American War and the Napoleonic Wars, our sailors had their hands so full at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, that they had no time to spare for unnecessary exploration, and there is, in consequence, a hiatus of forty years in the story of Arctic discovery. In 1817, however, Captain William Scoresby, junior, one of the most famous of Scotch whalers, reported to Sir Joseph Banks that he had found nearly 2000 square leagues of the Spitzbergen Sea free from ice, and that he had, in consequence, been able to sight the eastern coast of Greenland, at a meridian usually considered inaccessible, adding that it would be greatly to the advantage of our whale fishery if expeditions were sent out to continue the work of exploration which had remained in abeyance for so long. Both Sir Joseph Banks and Sir John Barrow, then Secretary to the Admiralty, were much impressed by this report and it was through their representations that the Government decided to send out two expeditions in 1818, one of which was to make an effort to reach the Pole, while the other was to search for the elusive North-West Passage. The list of the officers of these two expeditions included six names which were destined to become famous all over the world for their Arctic work—those of Back, Beechey, Franklin, Parry, John Ross, and James C. Ross.