Of the six desks of our topic, one of them is clearly pre-eminent in its origins, so I'll talk about it first. It has a provenance that involves a naval vessel, so I suppose I should talk first of that vessel and its history.
HMS Resolute was a mid-19th-century barque-rigged ship of the British Royal Navy, specially outfitted for Arctic exploration. She was sent, as part of the ill-fated Belcher expedition, to search in the western Canadian Arctic for the missing party of the explorer Sir John Franklin, which party had gone missing a few years earlier.
Resolute was one of a squadron of five ships searching the west coast, supplemented by two more on the east Canadian coast.
Resolute became trapped in the ice and was abandoned in 1854. Some of the other ships also got ice-bound and were abandoned, although all crew members were eventually rescued alive. On 10 September 1855, the abandoned
Resolute was found adrift by the American whaler
George Henry, captained by James Budington of Groton, Connecticut in an ice floe off Cape Walsingham of Baffin Island, 1,200 miles from where she had been abandoned. Budington claimed her as salvage and towed her home to New London, CT.
Although most of the expeditions in search of the lost Franklin expedition, before 1856, were funded by either the British government or by public subscription from within the British Empire, two expeditions were funded by Henry Grinnell, a New York merchant and shipowner in New Bedford, in addition to the assistance offered by the United States Government. Senator James Mason of Virginia, presented Congress with the bill to restore
Resolute and return her to England as a gesture of "national courtesy". Grinnell wrote in support of this bill. The United States Congress purchased the Resolute for $40,000. Once refitted, Commander Henry J. Hartstene sailed
Resolute to England to present the ship to Queen Victoria on 13 December 1856 as a token of national good will.
