Why Advance Lodge was named after the USS Advance: a small brigantine, a naval surgeon, and a village on the East River.
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Advance Lodge took its name from the vessel Elisha Kent Kane commanded on his second Arctic expedition. Henry Martin’s 1915 address identifies the founder who selected it: Robert McCoskry Graham, who also designed the lodge’s seal.
The vessel had been built for a less celebrated purpose.
Kane wrote that she had originally been intended to carry heavy castings from an iron foundry. Someone strengthened her afterward, at some expense, and she went north twice.
She was 88 feet long and a little over 21 feet wide, which is not much of a ship for the Arctic.
Why Advance Lodge was named after the USS Advance has a short answer and a longer one. The short answer is Graham’s choice. The longer story involves a lost expedition, a famous funeral, a Manhattan lodge named for Kane, and a small purple glass seal found on King William Island two years after he died.
A Small Vessel Sent North Twice
The Advance was a brigantine, two-masted and small, built in 1847 in New Kent County, Virginia, and originally named Augusta.
The U.S. Navy’s records give her at 144 tons, 88 feet long, 21 feet 9 inches wide, and 8 feet 5 inches deep, with a complement of seventeen.
In 1850 the New York merchant Henry Grinnell bought two small vessels and offered them to the Navy for the search for Sir John Franklin.
Franklin’s two ships had sailed for the Northwest Passage in 1845 and had not been heard from.
Grinnell’s vessels became Advance and Rescue. The Navy took Advance on loan on May 7, 1850. She left New York on May 23 under Lieutenant Edwin J. De Haven, with Rescue beside her.
Kane went as surgeon and naturalist.
The expedition found signs of Franklin’s winter camp at Beechey Island, including three graves. The ships were then caught in the ice and carried for months out of Wellington Channel and Lancaster Sound into Baffin Bay.
They reached New York on September 30, 1851.
Kane wrote the expedition’s story, lectured to large audiences, and raised money for another voyage.
The Navy gave command of Advance on that voyage, unusually, to a medical officer.
She left New York on May 30, 1853, and spent two winters frozen in at Rensselaer Harbor, on the Greenland side of Smith Sound.
Kane lost most of his sled dogs to disease, and scurvy went through the crew.
In May 1855 he abandoned the vessel. The party crossed the ice and sailed open water in boats to Upernavik, reaching it on August 6.
A Danish brig took them to Disko Island, where American relief ships under Lieutenant Henry Hartstene met them. They returned to New York on October 11, 1855.
A Naval Surgeon with a Long List of Fevers
Elisha Kent Kane was born in Philadelphia on February 3, 1820, the eldest son of a federal judge.
He went to the University of Virginia to study civil engineering, fell ill with rheumatic fever, switched to medicine, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania’s medical school in 1842.
On September 14, 1843, he became an assistant surgeon in the Navy.
The Navy then sent him around the world.
He sailed on USS Brandywine with Caleb Cushing’s diplomatic mission to China, which produced the Treaty of Wanghia. While Cushing negotiated, Kane explored Luzon in the Philippines.
He climbed down into the crater of Taal Volcano to collect water samples and was almost overcome by the fumes.
He served in the Africa Squadron and caught a coast fever, probably malaria, in February 1847.
A modern biographical dictionary lists cholera in China, typhoid in Egypt, septicemia in West Africa, and scurvy more than once among his illnesses.
During the Mexican War, Kane petitioned the Secretary of State to send him as a special envoy to General Winfield Scott in Mexico City, carrying a message that Scott was to stop negotiating.
His party was ambushed at Nopalucan on January 6, 1848.
Kane treated a Mexican general’s wounded son, saved his life, and refused to let Mexican prisoners be killed in reprisal.
Philadelphia gave him a ceremonial sword in 1849. He later worked for the Coast Survey, surveying the southeastern coast, before joining the first Grinnell expedition.
His Arctic voyages brought books, lectures, and honors from Congress, the Royal Geographical Society, and the geographical society of Paris.
He had not found Franklin. His accounts nevertheless made the search and its hardships known to a large public.
In 1857, after going to England to deliver his report to Lady Franklin in person, he went to Havana for his health.
He died there on February 16, aged thirty-seven.
His body traveled by way of New Orleans, steamboat, and funeral train to Philadelphia, where it lay in state at Independence Hall.
An encyclopedia of the Arctic describes it as the largest funeral in American history until Lincoln’s.
Kane’s Name in the Masonic World
Kane was a Freemason.
The Scottish Rite Masonic Museum and Library identifies him as a member of Franklin Lodge No. 134 in Philadelphia.
The Masonic response to his death is better documented in the material gathered here than the details of his lodge service.
On June 5, 1857, the Grand Lodge of the State of New York heard a memoir and eulogy pronounced by E. W. Andrews.
The published volume included an opening address by the Grand Master and letters from people who had known Kane. Grand Lodge ordered its publication.
The Franklin historian Russell Potter describes the volume as filled with praise of Kane and repeated references to his search for a supposed brother Mason, Sir John Franklin.
Arcana Lodge No. 246 in New York issued resolutions to raise money for a monument to Kane. A copy of the printed broadside survives in Kane’s papers at the American Philosophical Society.
Kane Lodge No. 454 in New York was named for him.
Lady Franklin wrote to its officers in 1858. They had assumed that her husband was a Mason.
She replied, with regret, that until reading their notice she had not known he had any claim on their fellowship.
The Library and Museum of Freemasonry in London found no lodge record for Franklin or for his second in command, James Fitzjames.
Kane’s memory had become part of Masonic public life, even where the fraternal identity attributed to the man he sought could not be established.
A Ship’s Name for an East River Lodge
Henry Martin told Advance Lodge in 1915 that Robert McCoskry Graham selected the name and designed the seal.
Graham was a village trustee, a county supervisor, and a member of Governor Hoffman’s staff. The lodge history lists his trade in 1866 as marine insurance.
He had been raised in 1854 in Arcana Lodge No. 246, the same lodge that raised funds for the Kane monument three years later.
No source in hand connects those facts as cause and effect.
What can be said is that Advance Lodge included men whose work touched the water.
The lodge history lists two ship carpenters among its petitioners, a harbor master who ran a livery stable, a customs man, and the submarine surveyor Benjamin S. H. Maillefert, who blasted rock in the Hell Gate channel.
Graham himself worked in marine insurance.
The lodge was founded ten years after Kane’s death and two years after the Civil War. The waterfront occupations provide context for the choice, not proof of the founders’ motives.
Martin’s address gives the lodge’s own account of the name.
Advance was named for the vessel Kane used on the two Grinnell expeditions. Graham’s seal showed the ship approaching a headland at the entrance to Lancaster Sound, adapted from an engraving in Kane’s account of the first voyage.
The name did not stay on the seal.
In 1879, when a brother drowned in Lake Ontario and his widow in Baltimore was destitute, two officers wired Canadian brethren to continue searching for the body and arrange a decent burial if it was found.
Subscriptions covered the funeral and provided money for the widow.
The lodge history said the Master’s faith had been justified and “the spirit of Advance” had triumphed.
It used the phrase again when the brethren paid for John Oloff’s monument by subscription.
When the lodge moved into its own temple in 1916, an old member objected to the former hall at 165 Fulton Avenue being called a dump.
The historian called life there, with affection, life in the “Old Brig.”
The Advance member directory lists Graham, Maillefert, Oloff, and the other founding names preserved in the working record.
A Glass Seal and a Letter from the Arctic
Kane never knew about the Masonic object found among the relics of Franklin’s expedition.
In May 1859 Captain F. L. McClintock’s expedition examined a boat site in Erebus Bay on King William Island.
Among the objects McClintock recorded was a glass seal bearing Masonic symbols.
It is now in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich: a rectangular piece of mauve glass with cut corners, measuring 12 by 10 by 10 millimeters, with a square and compasses and four letters.
Its owner is unknown.
The object does not establish that Franklin, Fitzjames, or any particular officer was a Mason.
Advance’s story returned to the lodge in another form in 1917.
Henry Martin wrote to Donald B. MacMillan, who had recently returned from the Crocker Land Expedition after four years in the Arctic searching for a land that did not exist.
MacMillan replied from Provincetown on November 4.
He said he had been made an honorary member of Kane Lodge in New York and had presented it with the American flag it had entrusted to him in 1913 to carry on his sledge.
He was interested to learn that another lodge had been named for Kane’s ship.
He also offered an account of the vessel’s end, attributing its destruction to a fire started by Inuit visitors after Kane’s departure. That account differs from the Navy’s explanation and is not established here as the vessel’s fate.
The plain answer to why Advance Lodge chose its name remains the one Martin supplied: a founder selected the name of Kane’s ship.
The longer story follows what the lodge did with it.
A vessel abandoned in the Arctic became an image on a seal, a phrase in accounts of relief, and an affectionate name for rooms above an Astoria tavern.
The ship did not return. The name remained, and it still leads the title of Advance Service Mizpah Lodge No. 586.
Sources and Notes
Lodge Histories and Correspondence
Henry Martin, “Historical Data of Advance Lodge No. 635,” November 20, 1915.
Advance Lodge history.
Donald B. MacMillan to Henry Martin, November 4, 1917.
Naval and Biographical Sources
Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships, via the Naval History and Heritage Command, entry for Advance.
Naval-history.net and Shipscribe entries for USS Advance.
Dictionary of Canadian Biography, entry for Elisha Kent Kane.
Elisha Kent Kane, The Far North, abridged edition.
Wikipedia articles on USS Advance (1847), the First and Second Grinnell expeditions, and Elisha Kent Kane, as included in the working source list.
[Before publication: identify the exact editions and entries used, including the Arctic encyclopedia cited for the funeral comparison, and replace secondary summaries where the underlying records have been consulted.]
Masonic and Archival Sources
Scottish Rite Masonic Museum and Library entries concerning Kane Lodge No. 454 and Franklin Lodge No. 134.
American Philosophical Society, Elisha Kent Kane Papers, including the Arcana Lodge broadside “Honor to Dr. Kane.”
E. W. Andrews, Memoir and Eulogy of Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, published by order of the Grand Lodge of New York, 1857.
Russell Potter, “Sir John Franklin a Freemason?”, Visions of the North, October 12, 2015.
Museum Object
Royal Museums Greenwich, Masonic glass seal, object AAA2197.
Note 1: Dates, Names, Figures, and Limits of the Record
Henry Martin gives Advance’s tonnage as 120. Navy histories and Kane give 144.
Navy histories call the vessel a brigantine. Kane, Martin, and many contemporaries call her a brig.
Martin gives September 6, 1851, for the first expedition’s return. The Navy gives September 30, the date used in the body.
Sources give May 22 or May 23, 1850, for the first expedition’s departure, and May 30 or May 31, 1853, for the second. The body uses May 23 and May 30.
Martin places the abandonment on May 17, 1855, as does the Navy’s account of the main party’s departure. Kane’s own record gives May 20. The body therefore gives the month without selecting a day.
Martin gives the winter harbor at 78 degrees 37 minutes north. The Navy gives 78 degrees 43 minutes as the vessel’s northernmost point. These descriptions should not be treated as automatically referring to the same location.
Kane’s birth is given as February 3 or February 28, 1820. The body follows February 3.
One museum source dates Kane Lodge No. 454 to 1859. Other material includes Lady Franklin’s 1858 letter and a thirtieth-anniversary program dated April 4, 1888. Its charter date requires verification before a year is adopted here.
Martin’s transcription gives Arcana Lodge as No. 240. The lodge history and Kane papers give No. 246, used in the body.
No source in hand identifies who renamed Augusta or precisely when.
The reported discovery date for the glass seal is May 30, 1859. Lieutenant Hobson had visited the boat site on May 24, and the museum notes that his report does not list everything he saw. The body gives the month rather than assigning the object’s first discovery to a particular visit.
The seal’s owner is unknown. Its presence among the expedition relics does not identify any individual as a Freemason.
The museum identifies Kane with Franklin Lodge No. 134, but his initiation date and the details of his lodge service are not documented in the working sources.
MacMillan’s 1917 account of the vessel’s destruction is a later report, not an eyewitness account established here. Navy histories instead say the vessel was presumably crushed by pack ice. Neither explanation is treated as a confirmed finding in this article.
The connection between Graham’s Arcana Lodge membership, that lodge’s Kane monument effort, and his later selection of the name Advance remains an inference. The sources establish the associations but do not explain his motive.
Start Here · Series Hub · Timeline · Previous Article: To Be Assigned · Next Article: To Be Assigned · Related Directory: Advance Members · Related Member Profiles: To Be Assigned
Related Reading
Elisha Kent Kane: Surgeon, Explorer and Freemason. Planned article.
Advance Lodge No. 635: Astoria’s First Masonic Lodge
Advance Lodge No. 635 and the Laying of Its Cornerstone
The Advance Masonic Temple in Astoria: A Lodge Building That Endured
Advance Lodge No. 635 Members Directory: Charter Members and Past Members
Benjamin S. H. Maillefert and the Hell Gate blasts. Profile link to be added.
How This Series Is Researched: Sources for Queens Lodge History
