More than twenty ships, with crews of nearly two thousand officers and men, at a cost of many millions of dollars, sought for Sir John Franklin in the years between 1847 and 1853. One heroic explorer after another sailed into the Arctic, crossed the ice-floes, and searched for some trace of the missing men. But none could be found, and one after another the explorers came back, their only report being that the ice had swallowed all traces of the English captain and his vessels. At length the last of the expeditions sent out by the English Government returned, and the world decided that the mystery would never be solved. But brave Lady Franklin, the wife of Sir John, urged still other men to seek for news, and at last explorers found that all of Franklin's expedition had perished in their search for the Northwest Passage. Arctic explorers usually leave records telling the story of their discoveries at different points along the road they follow. For a long time after the fate of Franklin's party was known, men tried to find records he might have left in cairns, or piles of stones through the Arctic regions. Whale vessels sometimes brought news of such records, but most of them proved to be idle yarns told by the whalers to surprise their friends at home. One of these stories was that all the missing records of Sir John Franklin were to be found in a cairn which was built near Repulse Bay. This story was told so often that people came to believe it was true, and some young Americans set out to make a search of King William Land and try to find the cairn. The party sailed on the whaler _Eothen_, and five men landed at Repulse Bay. The leader was Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka, of the United States Army. He had three friends with him named Gilder, Klutschak, and Melms, and with them was an Eskimo, who was known as Joe. The young Americans set up a winter camp on Chesterfield Inlet, and tried to live as much like the native Eskimos as possible. During the winter they met many natives on their hunting-trips, and the latter soon convinced them that they were on a wild-goose chase, and that the story of the cairn was probably only a sailor's yarn. Lieutenant Schwatka, however, was not the sort of man to return home without some results from his trip, and so he made up his mind to go into the country where Franklin's party had perished, hoping that he might find some record which would throw light on the earlier explorer's travels.