At last, but not until 1859, Lieutenant Hobson, an officer of Lady Franklin’s expedition under Captain McClintock’s command, found on King William Island three skeletons, two of them in a boat on a sleigh. In a stone cairn, too, he discovered the only written record of the tragedy, signed by Captain Crozier of the _Terror_. In a few sentences, scribbled on the edges of a printed form, this told that the ships had been beset by the ice since September 12, 1846; that Sir John Franklin had died on June 11, 1847; that on April 22, 1848, the ships had been abandoned; that twenty-four men, including nine officers, were dead; and that the remaining one hundred and five were starting for Back’s Fish River. It was too late. An old Eskimo woman was found who said that the strangers “fell down and died as they walked along.” Though Franklin was lost, the object of his search was found. The relief expeditions added immensely to our knowledge of the north, and filled in the great blank Arctic map with a labyrinth of islands and straits. In 1850 one British ship, the _Investigator_, rounding Cape Horn and passing in through Behring Sea, sailed eastward for hundreds of miles along the north coast of Alaska and Rupert’s Land, before being frozen in. Captain McClure, with six men in a sledge, pressed on over the ice through Prince of Wales Strait between Banks Land and Prince Albert Land, for six days, till they came in sight of Melville Sound, which had already been entered from the east. They had discovered, therefore, the existence of a North-west Passage; but when summer came, and the captain tried to bring his ship through the narrow strait, he was blocked by ice in mid-August, and had to spend a second winter frozen up. In April he was reached by a party from another ice-bound ship, the _Resolute_, which had come in from the Atlantic. Abandoning their own ship, McClure and his men went back with this party over the ice to the _Resolute_. That vessel also, and two others, had to be abandoned, after still another winter in the Arctic; and the crews were only rescued by fresh ships coming from England in 1854. As McClure and his men had come over the sea from the Pacific to the Atlantic Ocean, though not all the way by ship, they won a prize of $50,000 which the British Government had long before offered for the finding of the North-west Passage.