John was therefore taken from school at the age of
thirteen, and sent in a merchantman to Lisbon. The Bay of Biscay,
however, did not cure his enthusiasm; and so we next find John Franklin
as a midshipman on board the _Polyphemus_, seventy-four guns. These were
stirring times. In 1801 young Franklin's ship led the line in the battle
of Copenhagen, and in 1805, having been transferred to the
_Bellerophon_, he held charge of the signals at the battle of Trafalgar,
bravely standing at his post and coolly attending to his work while the
dead and dying fell around him.
Between these two dates Franklin had accompanied an exploring voyage to
Australia on board the _Investigator_, gaining in that expedition not
only a great store of facts to be treasured up for use in his eager and
retentive mind, but those habits of observation which were to be of the
greatest service to him in after-years. On his return home in another
vessel--the _Porpoise_--Franklin and his companions were wrecked upon a
coral reef, where ninety-four persons remained for seven weeks on a
narrow sand-bank less than a quarter of a mile in length, and only four
feet above the surface of the water!
It was in 1818 that the young lieutenant first set sail for the Polar
Sea, as second commander of the _Trent_, under Captain Buchan. The aim
was to cross between Spitzbergen and Greenland; but the companion
vessel, the _Dorothea_, being greatly injured by the ice, the two had to
return to England, after reaching the eightieth degree of latitude.
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