Farthest North: The Life and Explorations of Lieutenant James Booth Lockwood, of the Greely Arctic ExpeditionLanman, Charles
History
Farthest North: The Life and Explorations of Lieutenant James Booth Lockwood, of the Greely Arctic Expedition
Lanman, Charles
Arctic regions; Lady Franklin Bay Expedition (1881-1884); Lockwood, James Booth, 1852-1884
“The reward of twenty-five thousand dollars that Congress had
offered for the first information of Greely had incited the whalers
to take risks that they otherwise would have shunned. They had
expressed a determination to strive for it, and were ever on the
alert for a chance to creep northward. The Relief Squadron was
determined, on its part, that the whalers should not secure the
first information, and were equally zealous in pushing northward. It
was this rivalry (a friendly one, for our relations with the
whaling-captains were of the pleasantest nature) that hurried us
across Melville Bay and brought us together within sight of Cape
York. It had been thought possible that Greely or an advance party
might be there.”
Mr. Ellis proposed in the last session of Congress that, as the
reward had not been spent, yet had contributed to the rescue, it
should be appropriated to building, at Washington, a monument to the
dead.
The temporary halt at Disco Harbor was saddened by the death of
Ellison, after prolonged sufferings, as if his noble spirit was
determined to join its departed comrades in their passage to the
skies from that Northern Land of Desolation.
In the official record of the Relief Expedition, Commander Schley
makes an allusion to the important part taken by Lieutenant Lockwood
in the Greely Expedition which should be repeated in this place.
After submitting certain papers which had been found in a cairn at
Breevort Island, he says: “It was a wonderful story. It told how the
expedition, during its two years at Lady Franklin Bay, had marked
out the interior of Grinnell Land, and how Lockwood had followed the
northern shore of Greenland, and had reclaimed for America the honor
of ‘the farthest north.’”
On Thursday, the 17th of July, the Relief Expedition arrived at St.
John’s, Newfoundland, where they were kindly welcomed, and the
tidings of their arrival promptly telegraphed to the anxious
multitudes in the United States. Complete arrangements were made for
the continuous voyage of the living and the dead to their several
homes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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