The Sledges Turn for Home

The objects they carried—the relics of the Franklin expedition that would travel back to the Fox—did not speak, but they testified. Against the white exhaustion of July ice, two sledging parties dragged cargo that had become heavier than its physical weight. Francis Leopold McClintock measured this burden in nautical miles and in the silence that fell each evening when his men stopped to eat kerosene-tainted pemmican and sleep in canvas tents that offered no warmth. Lieutenant William Hobson, traveling a parallel route sixty miles to the south, calculated the same burden differently: in the precise number of canvas wraps required to transport human bones without damage, in the oilskin packets that must remain sealed against meltwater, in the mental discipline required not to speculate aloud about what the boat on the stony beach had meant.

They had set out in February 1859 as explorers. They returned in July and August as curators of disaster.

McClintock’s party reached the first depot on 3 July, finding the cached food intact but tasting, as he noted in his journal, of the tins in which it had been stored. They ate it anyway. The alternative was to add the full weight of their hunger to everything else they transported: the copper cylinder containing the Victory Point record, kept inside his coat through storms and river crossings; the sketchbook with charcoal drawings of cairns and coastlines; the miscellaneous relics gathered from Inuit traders at Boothia Peninsula.

Each item had been acquired through a transaction that was part commerce, part interrogation. McClintock had learned to ask his questions twice, through interpreters whose command of English and of Inuktitut varied, and to record the answers without immediate assessment. The cylinder’s contents he had verified himself, unrolling the paper in the shelter of a tent to confirm that the handwriting matched known samples from Franklin’s officers. Everything else traveled under provisional status: possible evidence, possible misunderstanding, possible irrelevance.

He had mastered travel through the manhauling of sledges, which remained the standard practice for overland travel in icy territory in the Royal Navy, but this return journey was a different kind of burden.

Hobson’s journey presented harder choices. The boat discovered on 30 May had contained objects that resisted easy classification. Two skeletons, still clothed, had been photographed in position before the clothing was searched. This was standard naval procedure for any death in circumstances requiring investigation.

But standard procedure had not anticipated skeletons eleven years old, or the problem of transporting them across summer ice that was breaking up into drift. Hobson’s solution, recorded in his journal without editorial comment, was to wrap the bones in canvas and assign them to the sledge that carried the medical supplies, on the theory that this was the party least likely to suffer damage. The boat itself they abandoned, too heavy and too frozen into the beach gravel to move.

From it they took the oars, the mast fragments, the miscellaneous equipment that might identify which ship it had come from, and the personal effects that might identify who had died in it.

The two parties converged on the Fox through different routes, each following the logic of ice conditions rather than direct bearing. McClintock reached the ship first, on 21 July, having traveled approximately 1, 200 miles since February. The Fox lay anchored in a cove on the eastern coast of Boothia Peninsula, where she had been frozen in since October 1858. Her hull, reinforced for ice navigation, had survived the winter with damage that the ship’s carpenter could repair. McClintock returned to find her essentially as he had left her, which was more than could be said for himself. The ship was the same steam yacht Lady Franklin had purchased and outfitted in 1857, but its mission had been transformed from search to inquest.

His journal entry for 21 July records the transfer of the copper cylinder from his personal custody to the ship’s strongbox, witnessed by the first lieutenant and entered in the official log. This transaction was not mere precaution. The cylinder contained the only written testimony from the Franklin expedition itself, a document whose chain of custody would need to be demonstrably unbroken for its contents to carry authority in London. McClintock understood that he was no longer simply an explorer returning from survey. He was a courier in a process that would extend far beyond the Arctic, and the integrity of that process required documentation at every stage.

Hobson arrived nine days later, on 30 July, his men visibly reduced by a journey of nearly 1, 400 miles. His cargo posed immediate practical problems that McClintock’s had not. The skeletons required preservation in a form that would survive the voyage to England. The miscellaneous relics from the boat—silver forks, silk handkerchiefs, firearms now unloaded—needed inventory and secure storage. The sketches Hobson had made, which were the only visual record of the boat’s position and contents, required protection from the damp that had already begun to blur some of the charcoal lines. McClintock’s solution, recorded in his journal for 31 July, was to establish separate storage protocols for each category. The relics were logged and packed in standard naval fashion. The sketches were placed between sheets of oilskin and weighted flat. The skeletons were treated as scientific specimens, wrapped and placed in a separate compartment, pending decision by higher authority.

The Fox remained at Boothia Peninsula through August, unable to break free of the ice that still held her. This enforced delay became, in retrospect, a period of preliminary analysis. McClintock and Hobson spent hours in the ship’s small cabin, comparing their separate discoveries and attempting to construct a coherent narrative from fragments.

The Victory Point record told of 105 survivors abandoning the ships in April 1848. The boat on the beach, 250 miles south, suggested that at least some of those survivors had attempted the overland journey toward the Great Fish River. The skeletons suggested the outcome of that attempt. But the gaps between these points remained unbridgeable by the evidence they possessed.

What had happened to the other ninety-odd men? Why had the boat been abandoned with its cargo of apparently useful items? What did the “great evil” mentioned in the record’s second, desperate addition actually refer to? The record itself, found by Hobson on 5 May, detailed the abandonment of Erebus and Terror, the death of Franklin and other crew members, and the decision by the survivors to march south to the mainland. Yet it stopped short of explaining the scene Hobson had witnessed.

McClintock’s published account would later describe these discussions with characteristic reticence, noting only that they had obtained sufficient information to form a tolerably correct opinion of the Franklin party’s fate. His private journal reveals more of the cognitive labor involved. On 15 August, he attempted a timeline, correlating the Victory Point dates with the physical evidence of the boat’s condition and the skeletons’ state of preservation. The effort produced more questions than answers. The boat’s position, so far south of the recorded abandonment point, implied either a much longer survival than the record suggested or a different group entirely. The skeletons’ clothing, still substantial after eleven years, contradicted expectations of complete exposure. Each piece of evidence, examined closely, seemed to destabilize interpretation rather than confirming it.

The ice release came suddenly in late August, a shift in wind and current that cracked the hold on the Fox without warning. McClintock made immediate decision to sail for Lancaster Sound and thence to Baffin Bay, abandoning any further search of the western coast. This was not surrender but calculation. The season was too advanced for additional sledging, and the cargo they carried required delivery before winter closed the North Atlantic. The ship’s course, plotted on 28 August, aimed directly for the Greenland whaling grounds and the Danish settlements where news could be transmitted to Europe.

The voyage south became a mobile laboratory for the preservation of evidence. McClintock instituted systematic procedures that went beyond standard naval practice. The copper cylinder remained in the strongbox, checked daily. The skeletons, transferred from the ice house as the ship entered warmer waters, were treated with a solution of spirits that the ship’s surgeon prepared according to instructions McClintock recalled from his earlier Arctic service. The relics were inventoried three times by different officers, with discrepancies resolved by physical inspection. This was not paranoia but professional foresight. McClintock had served in enough Admiralty inquiries to understand that evidence unimpeachable in the Arctic might be challenged in London by lawyers who had never seen ice.

The transformation of the searchers themselves proceeded in parallel. McClintock’s journal entries from September 1859, as the Fox approached Disko Bay, show a man rehearsing narratives. He drafted and redrafted the official report he would submit to the Admiralty, testing different orderings of the evidence. The chronological approach emphasized the systematic nature of his search. The evidentiary approach stressed reliability over drama. Neither ordering could accommodate everything he knew without including matters he was not yet prepared to state. The Inuit testimony he had gathered, with its reports of cannibalism among the starving men, remained in his private journal only, excluded from all drafts. He had confirmed John Rae’s controversial report gathered from Inuit sources, but he understood the cost of repeating its most shocking claims.

Hobson’s transformation was more visible and more painful. The younger officer had discovered the Victory Point record, the central document, yet found himself increasingly sidelined in the construction of meaning from it. His sketches of the boat, meticulous in their detail of the oars’ arrangement and the stones placed beneath the hull for support, were incorporated into McClintock’s developing account without separate attribution. His name appeared in the narrative primarily as the discoverer of specific items, not as an interpreter of their significance. The journal he kept during the return voyage, portions of which survive in the Royal Geographical Society archives, shows a man struggling with this reduction. On 12 September, he wrote an entry asserting that the record had been found by his party, then broke off abruptly, as if the sentence had revealed more than he intended.

The Fox reached Disko Bay on 21 September 1859. McClintock went immediately ashore to arrange transmission of news, sending duplicate dispatches by different routes to ensure arrival. The Danish governor provided facilities for further preservation of the skeletons, which were transferred to sealed casks with official seals. The copper cylinder, unopened, was placed in a locked box with McClintock’s personal key. These precautions reflected his understanding that he was now engaged in a competition for credibility that would be decided in rooms he had not yet entered.

The final leg of the voyage, from Greenland to England, took three weeks in favorable autumn weather. McClintock used this interval to complete his official report, producing a document that would become the foundation of all subsequent understanding of the Franklin expedition’s fate. Its structure reveals the discipline of a man who had learned to anticipate institutional reading. The report begins with the search methodology, establishing professional competence. It proceeds to the discoveries in order of importance: Victory Point record, boat site, additional relics and remains. Only then does it address interpretation, and even here McClintock maintains strategic restraint. The record’s statement regarding Franklin’s death in June 1847 is presented verbatim. The subsequent deaths of officers and men are enumerated. The decision to abandon the ships and march south is presented as the rational response to circumstances, not as error.

What the report does not contain is as significant as what it does. The Inuit testimony regarding cannibalism appears only in the most indirect form: the natives stated that they had seen white men falling down and dying as they walked. The specific reports of dismembered bodies, of cooking fires, of human bones in kettles—recorded in McClintock’s private journal—are entirely absent. So too is any speculation about the “great evil” mentioned in the record’s second entry. McClintock had read John Rae’s 1854 report, with its controversial Inuit testimony on the same subject. He understood the cost of such claims, and he chose, at this stage, to let the physical evidence speak without interpretive amplification.

The Fox anchored at Greenhithe, Kent, on 23 September 1859, four years and four months after her departure. The symmetry with the Franklin expedition’s own departure from the same location—19 May 1845—was noted in contemporary accounts, though McClintock’s own writings do not mention it. Perhaps the coincidence seemed too freighted, or perhaps he was simply too occupied with the immediate demands of landing. The skeletons required careful transfer to shore facilities. The copper cylinder needed secure transport to the Admiralty. The crew, who would share a £5, 000 parliamentary reward voted before their return, required management of expectations that the sum, divided twenty-five ways, would not substantially alter their lives. McClintock returned to England in September 1859, and was hailed as the discoverer of the lost expedition’s fate.

McClintock himself went directly to London, carrying the cylinder personally and refusing to delegate its custody even for the railway journey from Kent. His arrival at the Admiralty on 24 September, recorded in the official minute books, initiated a process that would extend far beyond his own participation. The cylinder was opened in the presence of the Hydrographer of the Navy and the Permanent Secretary, the paper inside unrolled and read aloud. The handwriting was identified as that of Captain Crozier of HMS Terror and Captain Fitzjames of HMS Erebus, both known from earlier correspondence. The dates were verified against the expedition’s known timeline. Within hours, the fundamental fact was established and communicated to the press: the Franklin expedition was definitively lost, and the manner of its loss was now documented.

But documentation was not the same as understanding. The record told that Franklin died in June 1847, that 105 men abandoned their ships in April 1848, that they intended to walk toward the Great Fish River. It did not explain why the ships had been trapped so far from their intended route, why the abandonment had occurred when it did, or what had become of the majority who never reached the boat site. These questions, which McClintock had carried across the ice and down the Atlantic, now passed into other hands.

The relics followed more slowly. The skeletons reached London in early October, transferred to the custody of the Royal College of Surgeons for examination. The boat sketches were reproduced for official circulation. The miscellaneous items were inventoried and deposited in the Admiralty’s collection. Each object, as it entered institutional custody, was separated from the interpretive context in which it had been found. The forks no longer sat beside the bones. The Victory Point record no longer rested in the pocket of the man who had carried it across the ice. The evidence was secured, but securing meant fragmentation.

McClintock’s own role in this process concluded with his knighthood, conferred in October 1859, and the subsequent publication of his narrative. The Voyage of the ‘Fox’ became the authoritative account, its author’s restraint interpreted as confirmation rather than strategic omission. Readers encountering his description of the boat site, with its careful enumeration of the skeletons found there, could not know what McClintock had chosen not to include: the scattered bones nearby, the reports of Inuit witnesses, the specific arrangements that suggested not simple death by exposure but something more desperate. The testimony funnel had done its work. Raw experience, filtered through naval propriety and personal caution, emerged as acceptable history.

Hobson, who had done the actual discovering, received no comparable recognition. He remained a lieutenant, his name attached to specific findings but not to their interpretation. The sketch he made of the boat’s position, with its careful notation of the stones beneath the hull and the oars arranged for departure, was reproduced in McClintock’s book without attribution. His own journal, with its more direct language about what the scene suggested, remained unpublished and largely unconsulted until twentieth-century researchers recovered it. The consolidation of evidence into authoritative narrative had required, as such consolidations often do, the reduction of multiple voices to one.

By November 1859, the Fox had been paid off and her crew dispersed to other assignments. The physical evidence of the Franklin expedition’s fate occupied various London locations: the Admiralty’s strong room, the Royal College of Surgeons, the Royal Geographical Society’s archives. Each item waited for the institutional machinery that would determine its meaning. The cylinder, now empty of its paper, became a curiosity. The bones became specimens. The silver plate became relics, donated eventually to the National Maritime Museum where visitors could view it without context.

McClintock, writing his narrative in the months after his return, described the final moments of his search with characteristic control, noting the satisfaction of knowing that he had done all that was possible to ascertain the fate of the Franklin expedition. The satisfaction was real, as far as it went. But the journal he kept alongside his official account, with its unresolved questions and its careful segregation of Inuit testimony, suggests a man aware that ascertainment and understanding were different achievements. He had found the record. He had secured the relics. He had established, against all competing claims, the priority of his own expedition in solving the mystery.

What he had not done, and what the institutional processing of his evidence would not do, was to fully confront the implications of what he had seen. The boat on the beach, provisioned for escape but abandoned with its cargo intact. The skeletons, searched and stripped of identification. The scattered bones that suggested not orderly death but its opposite. These remained, in McClintock’s published account, isolated observations without synthetic interpretation. The Victorian reading public received the story it was prepared to receive: brave men, unfortunate circumstances, a noble effort ending in documented tragedy.

The full record traveled in the cylinder that McClintock had carried, in the journals he had kept, in the memories of men who would speak only to each other. It would wait for other searchers, other interpreters, other institutional contexts in which the evidence could be re-examined without the constraints that had shaped its first presentation. The Fox had completed her voyage. The inquiry she enabled was only beginning.

The evidence sat in London now, distributed across offices and collections, each piece separated from the others by the very institutions that had promised to assemble the truth. The cylinder lay empty in the Admiralty’s strong room. The bones rested in the Royal College of Surgeons, awaiting examination by anatomists who had not seen the beach where they were found. The sketches lay flat in the Royal Geographical Society’s archives, their charcoal lines still showing where Hobson’s hand had pressed hardest to record the stones beneath the boat’s hull. McClintock’s private journal, with its account of what Inuit witnesses had said about the final days of starving men, remained in his own possession, unconsulted by the officials who would determine what the nation was permitted to know. The search had ended. The judgment had not yet begun.