"My dear Captain M'Clintock,
"You have kindly invited me to give you 'Instructions,' but I cannot bring myself to feel that it would be right in me in any way to influence your judgment in the conduct of your noble undertaking; and indeed I have no temptation to do so, since it appears to me that your views are almost identical with those which I had independently formed before I had the advantage of being thoroughly possessed of yours. But had this been otherwise, I trust you would have found me ready to prove the implicit confidence I place in you by yielding my own views to your more enlightened judgment; knowing too as I do that your whole heart also is in the cause, even as my own is. As to the objects of the expedition and their relative importance, I am sure that you know that the rescue of any possible survivor of the Erebus and Terror would be to me, as it would be to you, the noblest result of our efforts.
"To this object I wish every other to be subordinate; and next to it in importance is the recovery of the unspeakably precious documents of the expedition, public and private, and the personal relics of my dear husband and his companions.
"And lastly, I trust it may be in your power to confirm, directly or inferentially, the claims of my husband's expedition to the earliest discovery of the passage, which, if Dr. Rae's report be true (and the Government of our country has accepted and rewarded it as such), these martyrs in a noble cause achieved at their last extremity, after five long years of labour and suffering, if not at an earlier period.
"I am sure that you will do all that man can do for the attainment of all these objects; my only fear is that you may spend yourselves too much in the effort; and you must therefore let me tell you how much dearer to me even than any of them is the preservation of the valuable lives of the little band of heroes who are your companions and followers.
"May God in His great mercy preserve you all from harm amidst the labours and perils which await you, and restore you to us in health and safety as well as honour. As to the honour I can have no misgiving. It will be yours as much if you fail (since you may fail in spite of every effort) as if you succeed; and be assured that, under any and all circumstances whatever, such is my unbounded confidence in you, you will possess and be entitled to the enduring gratitude of your sincere and attached friend,
"Jane Franklin."
THE "FOX" ON A ROCK
The men of the Fox were worthy of the confidence placed in them. Leaving Aberdeen on the 1st of July, M'Clintock reached Disco on the last day of the month, and, proceeding northwards, was, by a perverse freak of fortune, beset in Melville Bay on the 8th of August, and kept imprisoned thence onwards all through the winter, drifting south through Baffin Bay and Davis Strait. On the 26th of April, 1858, after a drift of 1194 geographical miles, the Fox escaped from the pack and steamed to the eastward amid the most perilous of ice experiences. Most men would have returned and tried again; not so M'Clintock. He boldly ran up the Greenland coast as if nothing had happened and, making good deficiencies, resumed his voyage. Soon after leaving Sanderson's Hope the Fox was nearly wrecked near Buchan Island, remaining on a rock until the tide rose again to set her free. After calling at Beechey Island, M'Clintock followed Franklin's track down Peel Sound until stopped by the pack, when he retraced his course and tried Prince Regent Inlet, reaching Bellot Strait on the 21st of August. At Port Kennedy in this famous waterway—which is like a Greenland fiord, about twenty miles long and scarcely a mile wide at its narrowest part, the water four hundred feet deep within a quarter of a mile of its northern shore—he passed the winter.