In this journey Hobson's party barely escaped perishing through a violent northeasterly gale which drove seaward the ice-pack on which they were encamped. McClintock says that on discovering that the entire ice-field was adrift "They packed their sledge, harnessed the dogs, and passed the long and fearful night in anxious waiting for some chance to escape. A little distance offshore the ice broke up under the influence of the wind and sea, and the disruption continued until the piece they were on was scarce twenty yards in diameter. Impelled by the storm, in utter darkness and amid fast-falling snow, they drifted across a wide inlet. The gale was quickly followed by a calm, and an intense frost in a single night formed ice strong enough to bear them safely to land, although it bent fearfully under their weight. Their escape was indeed providential."
King William Land.
Death spared these men of action in the field, but it invaded the ship, and Brand, the engineer, died of apoplexy.
When the sun came back after seventy-three days of absence, McClintock decided to take the field, and started February 14, earlier than any previous arctic traveller, for an extended journey. His great hope of success depended on finding Eskimos in the region of the north magnetic pole, which entailed a trip of four hundred and twenty miles, in temperatures as much as eighty degrees below the freezing-point.
Sledging through an unknown country, wearily breaking day after day a trail for his emaciated, untrained dogs, McClintock vainly searched the unbroken snowy wastes for trace of sledge or of man, and anxiously scanned the dreary landscape for sight of the longed-for igloo or hut. The cold was intense, the land was barren of game, the region seemed accursed in its desolation, while the conditions of travel were hard in the extreme.
The absence of human life was far more distressing to the heroic McClintock than the rigors of the journey, for without Inuit aid the labors and sufferings of his crew and of himself would be unavailing. Was it possible that the region was abandoned by beast and so by man? Was his mission destined to be a failure? Could he succeed without Eskimo help?
He reached the magnetic pole without seeing any one, his dogs in such fearful plight that he could advance but one day farther. Six of the dogs were then useless, and during the journey the poor animals had so suffered from poor food, intense cold, and bad snow that several of them had repeatedly fallen down in fits.
When he was quite in despair, several Eskimos returning from a seal hunt crossed his trail and visited his camp. From the winter colony of forty-five Boothians he gained his first tidings of the missing explorers. One native said that a three-masted ship had been crushed by ice to the west of King William Land, but the crew came safe to shore. Another told of white men who starved on an island (probably Montreal) where salmon came. That the men had perished was quite clear from the abundance of Franklin relics among the Eskimos—buttons, knives, forks, McDonald's medal and a gold chain, which McClintock bought at the average price of one needle each. None of the Inuits had seen the whites, but one native had seen some of their skeletons.