Lady Franklin and her friends continued to press upon Government the need for further inquiry; but finding the responsible ministers unwilling to interfere in what they had come to consider a hopeless enterprise, they contrived, with some help from the public, to purchase and fit out a strongly-built screw-schooner, of which Captain M’Clintock volunteered to take the command.
He sailed from England in the summer of 1857; reached Melville Bay in safety, but was then held fast by the floating ice. The winter, however, came and went without any injury to him and his gallant band; and on the 27th of July 1858, the Fox stretched across to Lancaster Sound. On the 11th of August she arrived at Beechey Island, and replenished her diminished stores from the depôts left there by previous expeditions. Then she pushed to the westward, past Cape Hotham and Griffith Island, southward through Sir Robert Peel Channel, and so into Prince Regent Inlet. Having arrived off the eastern entrance of Bellot Strait, she found it blocked up by a wall of ice, and from the 20th of August to the 6th of September she watched for an opportunity of breaking through it. On the 6th she made the passage, but only to find the other end obstructed by an impassable ice-barrier; and, after five fruitless attempts, her captain brought her to anchor for the winter in Port Kennedy, on the northern side of the strait.
When the new year opened, M’Clintock resolved on undertaking sledge excursions in various directions, with the view of obtaining some information of Franklin and his expedition. In one of them, at Cape Victoria, on the west coast of Boothia (lat. 69° 50’ N., long. 96° W.), he ascertained from the natives that, several years previously, a ship had been wrecked off the northern shores of King William’s Land; that all her crew landed safely, and set off on a journey to the Great Fish River, where they died. Again: in April, falling in with the same party of Eskimos, they learned further, that besides the ship which had sunk in deep water, another had been driven ashore by the ice. Captain M’Clintock thereupon crossed to Montreal Island, travelled round the estuary of the Great Fish River, and visited Point Ogle and Barrow Island. On May 7, he fell in with an old Eskimo woman, who told him that many of the white men dropped by the way as they made towards the Great Fish River; that some were buried, and some were not. Proceeding in what he conceived to have been the route of the retreating crews, he discovered, near Point Herschel, a bleached skeleton; evidently that of one who had fallen behind the main body, from weakness and fatigue, and had died where he had fallen.
DISCOVERY OF THE CAIRN CONTAINING SIR JOHN FRANKLIN’S PAPERS.
RELICS OF THE FRANKLIN EXPEDITION BROUGHT BACK TO ENGLAND.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Hobson, who had started with another sledging party, had made the important discovery of a record, giving a brief account of the Franklin expedition up to the time when the ships were lost. It was found within a cairn constructed on Point Victory, and it set forth the following particulars:—
The Erebus and Terror spent their first winter at Beechey Island, in the spot discovered by Penny and Austin’s expedition; but they had previously explored Wellington Channel as far as 73° N., and passed down again into Barrow Strait, between Cornwallis and Bathurst Land. In 1846 the two ships seem to have sailed through Peel Channel, until caught in the ice off King William’s Land, on the 12th of September. In May 1847, Lieutenant Graham Gore and Mr. des Vœux landed, and erected a cairn a few miles south of Point Victory, and deposited in it a document which stated that, on that day, all were well, with Sir J. Franklin in command. Within a month, however, that illustrious navigator died (June 11), and thus was spared the terrible trials which afflicted his followers. The ice did not move, and the winter of 1847–48 closed in upon them. It proved fatal to nine officers and fifteen men. On April 22, 1848, the two ships, which had been imprisoned for upwards of nineteen months, were deserted, and the officers and crews, one hundred and five in number, under the command of Captains Crozier and Fitzjames, started for the Great Fish River.
At the cairn and all about it lay a great quantity of clothing and other articles, which the sufferers had found from experience of three days to be a heavier weight than their enfeebled strength was able to drag.