It was in early spring in 1852, early on the morning of the 21st of April, that the stout English discovery ship Resolute, manned by a large crew, commanded by a most manly man, Henry Kellett, left her moorings in the great river Thames, a little below the old town of London, was taken in tow by a fussy steam-tug, and proudly started as one of a fine English squadron in the great search of the nations for the lost Sir John Franklin.  It was late in the year 1855, on the 24th of December, that the same ship, weather-worn, scantily rigged, without her lighter masts, all in the trim of a vessel which has had a hard fight with wind, water, ice, and time, made the light-house of New London,—­waited for day and came round to anchor in the other river Thames, of New England.  Not one man of the English crew was on board.  The gallant Captain Kellett was not there; but in his place an American master, who had shown, in his way, equal gallantry.  The sixty or seventy men with whom she sailed were all in their homes more than a year ago.  The eleven men with whom she returned had had to double parts, and to work hard to make good the places of the sixty.  And between the day when the Englishmen left her, and the day the Americans found her, she had spent fifteen months and more alone.  She was girt in by the ice of the Arctic seas.  No man knows where she went, what narrow scapes she passed through, how low her thermometers marked cold;—­it is a bit of her history which was never written.  Nor what befell her little tender, the “Intrepid,” which was left in her neighborhood, “ready for occupation,” just as she was left.  No man will ever tell of the nip that proved too much for her,—­of the opening of her seams, and her disappearance beneath the ice.  But here is the hardy Resolute, which, on the 15th of May, 1854, her brave commander left, as he was ordered, “ready for occupation,”—­which the brave Captain Buddington found September 10, 1855, more than a thousand miles from there, and pronounced still “ready for occupation";—­and of what can be known of her history from Old London to New London, from Old England’s Thames to New England’s Thames, we will try to tell the story; as it is written in the letters of her old officers and told by the lips of her new rescuers.

For Arctic work, if ships are to go into every nook and lane of ice that will yield at all to wind and steam, they must be as nearly indestructible as man can make them.  For Arctic work, therefore, and for discovery work, ships built of the teak wood of Malabar and Java are considered most precisely fitted.  Ships built of teak are said to be wholly indestructible by time.  To this we owe the fact, which now becomes part of a strange coincidence, that one of the old Captain Cook’s ships which went round the world with him has been, till within a few years, a whaling among the American whalers, revisiting, as a familiar thing, the shores which she was first to discover.  The English admiralty, eager to fit out for Arctic service a ship of the best build they could find, bought the two teak-built ships Baboo and Ptarmigan in 1850,—­sent them to their own dock-yards to be refitted, and the Baboo became the Assistance,—­the Ptarmigan became the Resolute, of their squadrons of Arctic discovery.