For more than a decade, thirty-one expeditions, both public and private, British and American, searched in vain for Franklin. Tantalizing clues — three graves on a small Arctic beach, relics bought from the Inuit, and disturbing stories told by the Inuit of ships trapped in ice, of men struggling to march overland and dying along the way, and of cannibalism and murder — filled the years of searching, but no conclusive evidence — wrecked ships or records of the Franklin expedition— had been found. Lady Jane Franklin, wife of the missing explorer, pushed the British government to keep on looking, even after a large search expedition in 1854 ended with the loss of several ships: “The final and exhaustive search is all I seek on behalf of the first and only martyrs to Arctic discovery in modern times, and it is all I ever intend to ask.”

But Britain had sacrificed much to search for Franklin, and now, in 1854, was caught up in an expensive war on Russia’s Crimean Peninsula. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine summed up what Britain had gained, at great cost: “No; there are no more sunny continents — no more islands of the blessed — hidden under the far horizon, tempting the dreamer over the undiscovered sea; nothing but these weird and tragic shores, whose cliffs of everlasting ice and mainlands of frozen snow, which have never produced anything to us but a late and sad discovery of depths of human heroism, patience, and bravery, such as imagination could scarcely dream of.”

In April 1857, the British government informed Lady Franklin that they had “come, with great regret, to the conclusion that there was no prospect of saving life, [and] would not be justified… in exposing the lives of officers and men to the risk inseparable from such an enterprise.” But the determination of Lady Franklin and her years of urging on the search for her missing husband and his men touched many heartstrings. So, when the British government gave its final refusal, Lady Franklin made a public plea and raised nearly £3,000 to send out her own search expedition. She bought the steam yacht Fox, a 120-foot, Scottish-built vessel, from the estate of Sir Richard Sutton, a master of the traditional hunt who had named the ship for his favorite quarry.

Lady Franklin placed Fox under the command of Captain Francis Leopold McClintock, a veteran of two Arctic voyages in search of Franklin. At his direction, shipyard workers stripped off the fancy fittings of the yacht, strengthened the hull with extra layers of planking to protect it from the ice, enlarged the boiler, sheathed the bow in iron “until it resembled a ponderous chisel set up edgeways” and braced the hull to keep it from being crushed when frozen in for the winter in the pack ice. McClintock explained: “Internally she was fitted up with the strictest economy in every sense, and the officers were crammed into pigeonholes, styled cabins, in order to make room for provisions and stores; our mess-room, for five persons, measured 8 feet square.”

The Illustrated London News also described Fox: “There is very little ornament about her, but what she has is in wonderfully good condition. The Fox has three slender, rather raking masts, is of topsail schooner rig, and small poop aft. She is rather sharp forward and her bows are plated over with iron… She looks not unlike a bundle of heavy handspikes, iron pointed at each end, for fending off drift ice.”

McClintock and his officers and crew all volunteered their services without pay. For two long years they would endure hardship, cold, near shipwreck and three deaths on their quest to find Franklin.

Fox steamed out of Scotland on June 30, 1857, but when she reached the Canadian Arctic, was stopped in Baffin Bay by the early onset of winter and was trapped in the ice. There was nothing to do but dig in and wait, drifting with the ice pack. It was an occasionally harrowing eight-month ordeal, in which the boredom of confinement gave way to the terror of moving ice. After drifting 1,194 miles, the chance to escape came at last in late April. As Fox fought for eighteen hours to be free, ice constantly struck the hull, causing “the vessel to shake violently, the bells to ring, and almost knocked us off our legs.” McClintock commented, “I can understand how men’s hairs have turned grey in a few hours.” The ice, when it hit the stern, wrenched the rudder and stopped the propeller: “deprived of the one or the other, even for half an hour, I think our fate would have been sealed.”

Once free of the ice, Fox headed to Greenland for more supplies. After sending letters home to explain why they would be gone longer than planned, McClintock and his crew turned west again for the Canadian Arctic. In the Arctic archipelago, McClintock explored the shores of Somerset Island and Bellot Strait before anchoring Fox near the eastern entrance to the narrow strait. With the ship frozen in for the winter, McClintock prepared to sledge west over the ice and land to reach King William Island, where a few years earlier, Hudson’s Bay Company explorer Dr. John Rae had met some Inuit who told him about men whose ships, trapped in ice, had been abandoned. The men, trekking south, were starving and many had fallen on their march. Some had resorted to cannibalism. The Inuit had a number of items belonging to the dead men that Rae bought from them, including the personal effects of several of Franklin’s officers and Franklin himself. The story, when it reached England along with the “relics,” excited great interest and horror. Now McClintock, Lieutenant William Hobson and Sailing Master Allen Young would head off in three separate parties to search the region to see what they could find.

On his journey, McClintock learned from Inuit that two ships had been trapped by ice near King William Island, that one had sunk in deep water and that “all the white men went away to the large river, taking a boat or boats with them, and that in the following winter their bones were found there.” The Inuit had salvaged steel and wood from the doomed expedition, and as McClintock pushed farther south, he found Inuit who had in their possession silver spoons and forks “bearing the crests or initials” of Franklin and some of his officers, as well as “uniform and other buttons” and wood from a ship. They told McClintock about a ship, pushed onto shore by the ice, where they had gathered their treasures.

McClintock continued on to King William Island, where he and his party found more relics, and finally, on May 25, “when slowly walking along a gravel ridge near the beach, which the winds kept partially bare of snow, I came upon a human skeleton, partly exposed, with here and there a few fragments of clothing appearing through the snow.” McClintock also recovered a notebook that yielded up a few sentences about abandoning the ships and ended with a scrawled: “Oh death, whare [sic] is thy sting?” He found a hairbrush and comb, and from the fragments of the uniform, deduced that it was the skeleton of a steward or officer’s servant from the Franklin expedition. As McClintock stood looking at the bones, he recalled the words of an old Inuit woman he had questioned: “They fell down and died as they walked along.”

When McClintock headed north, back up King William Island to return to Fox, he made a last poignant discovery: a ship’s boat, laden with equipment and spare clothing, and two more skeletons, one wrapped in clothing and furs. After loading up a small quantity of items — silverware and ship’s instruments — McClintock continued his search for the wrecked ship. Instead, he found a pile of goods, stashed on the shore by the Franklin expedition. Plucking more relics from the pile, McClintock travelled back to Fox, arriving on June 19. When warm weather returned in July, McClintock reassembled the steam machinery laid up for the winter, and Fox set off for home.