Next38. Kane, Elisha Kent (1820-1857)
The U.S. Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin: A Personal Narrative. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1854.
The graves of three of Franklin’s crewmen on Beechey Island, from Elisha Kent Kane, The U.S. Grinnell Expedition, 1854.
The Advance and Rescue entering Lancaster Sound, from Elisha Kent Kane, The U.S. Grinnell Expedition, 1854.
The Rescue nipped in Melville Bay, from Elisha Kent Kane, The U.S. Grinnell Expedition, 1854.
In 1850, an American businessman, Henry Grinnell, bought two ships, the Advance and Rescue, and offered them to the U.S. government to help in the search for Franklin. Elisha Kent Kane was a surgeon on the Advance.
This expedition sailed into Lancaster Sound and encountered the four ships of the Austin expedition, as well as the ships of William Penny and John Ross.
Kane was at Beechey Island when the graves of three of Franklin’s crewmen were discovered; his drawing of the gravesite is one of the most evocative images on any of the arctic voyages.
The Advance and Rescue were frozen in at Wellington Channel shortly thereafter, and the ice eventually carried them all the way out of Lancaster Sound into Baffin Bay; they were unable to free themselves until the next summer.
Unable to return to Lancaster Sound, they came home. So the first American arctic expedition did not accomplish much. But Kane’s narrative was a great success; he was a master prose stylist, and his dark drawings, often showing tiny ships dwarfed by massive icebergs under moonlit clouds, really captured the loneliness of an Arctic winter.
