A gavel presented in 1894, cut from a ship that was given up for lost in the ice and then sailed home without her crew.
In 1852 HMS Resolute sailed north as part of Sir Edward Belcher’s expedition, sent to look for Sir John Franklin and the men who had gone with him and not come back.
She did not find them. In 1854, trapped in the ice, Belcher ordered her abandoned. Her crew walked away across the floes and left her where she was.
That should have been the end of it. Instead the ice let go, and Resolute drifted for more than a thousand miles on her own, unmanned, until an American whaler came across her in the Davis Strait in 1855, still afloat and in remarkably good order. She was sailed to Connecticut, bought and refitted by the United States Congress, and returned to Queen Victoria as a gesture of goodwill.
When she was finally broken up in 1879, her timbers were kept and put to use.
Some of that oak came to us. In 1894 W. Bro. J. R. W. Soper presented the Lodge with a gavel made from Resolute’s timbers, and it has been here ever since.