Antiques.

 
Not, here! the white North has thy bones; and thou, Heroic sailor-soul, 
Art passing on thine happier voyage now Toward no earthly pole. 
Alfred, Lord Tennyson on Sir John Franklin's cenotaph in Westminster 
Abbey, London, 1875 

Beginning in 1815, following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, England decided to use its victorious navy to revive the search for the long-sought northern passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. That quest had begun centuries earlier when intrepid Elizabethans, realizing that the New World was a huge landmass blocking any direct westerly maritime trade route to Cathay, faced the fact that they might have to sail north around it if they wanted to avoid sailing thousands of miles south around the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn. In 1576 a fleet of fifteen ships and four hundred men set sail under Martin Frobisher in search of gold and a way west, and theirs were the first English ships to enter what is now Hudson Strait. Merchants soon learned, however, after the loss of countless men and ships, that even if there were a passage through the Arctic it would be commercially useless. So, by the nineteenth century motives to pursue the search had changed.

News of the melting of the northern polar ice caps and reports by whaling captains that the Greenland seas were free of ice in 1817 prompted a sustained new search for the Northwest Passage. Sir John Barrow, an ardent imperialist and promoter of polar exploration, entered the Admiralty as the second secretary convinced that Britain's security and future wealth depended on control of the world's sea lanes. A prolific writer best known for The Eventful History of the Mutiny and the Piratical Seizure of H. M.S. Bounty (1831), his interests ranged widely but the bulk of his output had a geographic focus. In his Chronological History of Voyages into the Arctic Regions, published in 1818, he summarized the state of knowledge about the Arctic seas and concluded with a description of preparations for a two-pronged attack on this last great uncharted ocean. With his power to appoint officers for such ventures, Barrow was able to send ...