The Purchase of the Fox

The bill of sale was drawn in Aberdeen on a spring morning in 1855, the ink still wet when Lady Jane Franklin’s agent counted out banknotes for a pleasure yacht that would never cruise the Channel again. The Fox changed hands for £2, 000. Oak and brass and a compact steam engine were part of the deal; so was the possibility of continuing what official Britain had determined to end. The vessel’s previous owner had fitted her for speed and comfort; her new owner intended to send her against ice.

This purchase marked a decisive pivot in the twelve-year search for Sir John Franklin’s expedition. Where the state withdrew, the market advanced. The Royal Navy had exhausted its suitable hulls on a dozen years of Arctic search, had officially labelled the case closed after John Rae’s 1854 report of cannibalism, and had allowed parliamentary committees to recommend against further expenditure. The Admiralty did not plan another search of its own. What remained was a widow with colonial experience of managing constrained resources, a public subscription fund that had begun in outrage and persisted as moral accounting, and the leavings of private commerce—yachts, whalers, trading vessels—available to anyone with cash and a reason to spend it. Lady Franklin had both, and she spent them on the Fox.

The vessel lay at Aberdeen’s quayside through the summer of 1855, inspected and measured, pronounced sound enough for modification. Her yacht’s cabin came out to make space for stores. Her engine, adequate for outrunning bad weather in coastal waters, needed reinforcement for ice work. The hull received additional timber sheathing—not the full armor that had protected HMS Erebus and HMS Terror in 1845, but sufficient to withstand grinding pack. These alterations consumed months and further thousands of pounds, drawn from the Franklin Search Fund that Lady Franklin administered and from her own diminishing resources. She had learned budget management in Tasmania, overseeing convict labor and colonial accounts; she understood that a ship was a ledger item that must yield results. She signed the contracts. She approved the specifications. She corresponded with naval architects who had survived Arctic winters and knew what the Fox must become.

The technical record of these changes survives in the expedition’s official account: 177 tons burden, 100 horsepower, screw propeller, coal capacity for six weeks of steam. These numbers testify to prudent preparation. They also record constraint. The Fox was smaller than any naval search vessel of the previous decade, less powerful, less capable of independent operation in heavy ice. Her design assumed support from shore, from Inuit contact, from the local knowledge that naval expeditions had often discounted. She was no fleet flagship but a probe, outfitted for a specific hypothesis about where Franklin’s men had gone, and her limitations shaped what she could find.

Why this vessel, and why then? The question leads backward through accumulating official failure. James Clark Ross had sailed in 1848 with two ships and found nothing. The 1850 fleet had discovered the Beechey Island graves—three mounds with headboards naming dead crewmen—but no living men, no explanation of why the expedition had moved on from its first winter harbor. Richard Collinson and Robert McClure had spent five years in the ice, emerging with their own survival rather than Franklin’s fate as their achievement.

Rae and Anderson, in 1854, had brought back physical proof from the Boothia Peninsula and King William Island: silverware marked with Franklin’s crest, a medal awarded to a Terror officer, Inuit testimony of ships crushed in the ice and men dragging boats southward toward starvation. The Admiralty had responded by closing the file.

The Royal Navy officially labelled the crew deceased in service on 31 March 1854. This administrative decision, announced in the months after Rae’s report convulsed the reading public with its suggestion of cannibalism, had the effect of clearing the field for private action. Where bureaucratic caution ended, determined expenditure began.

The transformation of the Fox continued through 1856. At Southampton, where she lay taking on coal and stores, workmen built sledges to specifications developed from Arctic experience, procured clothing in the patterns that Rae’s journeys had proven, assembled medical supplies calibrated to scurvy and frostbite and the infections that followed both. Each item represented a decision about conditions: how long men might survive unsupported, how far dogs could travel on given rations, what weight of records might be carried back from a discovery. The planning assumed failure as possibility and prepared for it. McClintock, when he came to command, would find these preparations already in train, the vessel becoming what the mission required.

The man chosen to lead this enterprise was Francis Leopold McClintock, forty-seven years old in 1857, a captain of moderate seniority with no independent command of significance. His qualifications were operational rather than heroic. He had learned Arctic travel through the practice of sledge journeys, first under Ross in 1848, then in independent commands that mapped coastlines by dragging boats across ice, survived winters in stone huts, reduced reliance on uncertain supplies through techniques of man-hauling and ration calculation. Lady Franklin had observed him, corresponded with him, judged him capable of the methodical search she required. In April 1857, at Lady Jane Franklin’s request, McClintock agreed to take command of the Fox and led a 25-man crew in a new search for Franklin’s lost expedition in the area west of Repulse Bay.

The timing was precise. McClintock had been present at the creation of the Franklin mystery. In 1848, as a lieutenant under Ross, he had searched the same waters he would now revisit. The case was not abstract to him; it was professional unfinished business, a failure he shared and might now resolve. The Arctic offered advancement unavailable in fleet service, where blockade and station duty consumed careers without distinction. More immediately, Lady Franklin’s invitation offered command, purpose, and the possibility of concluding what the Navy had abandoned. He accepted the terms: a private expedition with official license, answerable to a widow rather than an admiral, to subscription donors rather than the Board of Admiralty.

The crew assembled through channels that Arctic service had created. The Fox carried veterans of previous searches: ice masters who could read pressure ridges, surgeons trained in scurvy prevention, seamen who had learned to build snow houses and repair sledges with frozen fingers. Twenty-five men, a small company compared to the 129 who had sailed on Erebus and Terror, but sufficient for the Fox’s scale and mission. They signed articles knowing the risks, drawn by wages, by loyalty to McClintock, by the restlessness and ambition that had always populated exploration vessels. Their numbers appear in the sailing lists; their individual motives must be inferred from the general pattern of Arctic service, the attraction of discovery, the wages that exceeded fleet pay.

The plan they prepared was specific to information that Rae had gathered and official expedition had not pursued. Inuit sources interviewed between 1852 and 1858 had described a ship crushed in the ice off King William Island, survivors trekking south toward the mainland, death at various points along the coast. These accounts varied in detail—numbers, dates, locations shifted between tellings—but converged on geography. The island’s southern and western shores, particularly the area around Victory Point and the western approaches to Simpson Strait, appeared repeatedly as sites of European presence and disaster. McClintock’s instructions directed him to this coastline, to search it with systematic thoroughness, to find physical confirmation of the expedition’s final movements and, if possible, written records that would explain them.

This method inverted the assumptions of official search. Naval expeditions had sought Franklin’s ships, assuming that finding Erebus and Terror would reveal their crews. McClintock proposed to find the crews’ traces—camps, cairns, bodies—and let them point toward the ships or explain their absence. The strategy acknowledged what Rae’s testimony suggested: that the ships had been destroyed or abandoned, that the men had attempted escape on foot, that the search must become archaeological rather than rescue. The plan was designed for verification, not hope.

The financing of this plan reveals the institutional shift the Fox represented. Lady Franklin’s subscription fund had begun in 1850 with contributions from across British society: working men sending shillings, peers signing hundred-pound notes, the Queen herself contributing. By 1855, this fund had outlasted its official counterpart.

The Admiralty’s annual search budgets had been absorbed into general naval expenditure, then reduced, then eliminated. The Franklin Search Fund, privately administered, continued to receive donations specifically directed toward resolution. Between 1850 and 1857 she fitted out, mainly if not entirely at her own expense, no less than five ships for the search; the last of these, the Fox, being the one that succeeded in bringing back the story of the lost expedition. The purchase and outfitting of the Fox consumed these resources in visible, accountable ways: payments to shipyards, invoices for provisions, salaries for crew. The fund’s accounts, published in excerpt after the expedition’s return, demonstrated that private money could achieve what public money would not.

Independence was not quite what this was. The Fox sailed with Admiralty blessing if not Admiralty funds, carrying official instructions that licensed McClintock to claim any discoveries for the Crown. The government provided charts, instruments, naval stores at cost. The relationship was partnership without commitment: the state contributing capacity, the widow contributing will. What the arrangement avoided was the committee oversight, the strategic hesitation, the annual review that had slowed and finally stopped official search. Lady Franklin decided; McClintock executed; the Fox moved toward departure without the delays of bureaucratic season.

The preparation extended through 1856 and into 1857. There were sledges to build or acquire, ammunition for hunting and defense, forms for recording finds, materials for preserving papers, instructions for photographing or sketching any human remains. McClintock reviewed every aspect of the vessel’s readiness, corresponded with Arctic veterans about equipment and route, built a crew that could operate in the conditions he anticipated. The method was characteristic: thorough, unhurried, attentive to small failures before they became large ones. He understood that his own expedition might become another entry in the search ledger, another unexplained loss for future investigators to puzzle over.

At Disko Bay on the west coast of Greenland, he would hire 30 sled dogs and an Inuk driver. The dogs were not auxiliary; they were essential to the plan’s geography. McClintock intended to reach King William Island by sledge, crossing the ice of Bellot Strait or rounding its southern extremity, depending on conditions. The ship would serve as base; the search would proceed on foot and sledge, along coastlines where ships could not penetrate. This transport system, demonstrated by Rae and inconsistently employed by naval expeditions, would carry the expedition to its objective.

The emotional texture of this preparation shaped its material details. Lady Franklin, now sixty-five, had spent twelve years in the expedition’s shadow. She had buried hopes repeatedly: the first summers of anticipated return, the discovery of the Beechey Island graves, the publication of Rae’s report with its intolerable implications. The Fox represented a final calculation. If this search failed, if McClintock found nothing or found only confirmation of Rae’s worst suggestions, she would have exhausted her resources and her public credit. The vessel’s purchase was thus a form of wagering, staking remaining capital on a decisive throw. Her correspondence from this period, preserved in fragment, shows the administrative precision that had always characterized her: instructions to McClintock about equipment, requests for progress reports, arrangements for insurance and contingency. The grief was constant; its expression was practical.

For McClintock, the command offered a different calculus. Liberation and burden together. The Fox’s success would be his; its failure would be his also, without the dispersal of responsibility that naval hierarchy provided. He prepared accordingly, building a crew that could operate in the conditions he anticipated, developing a plan that assumed the worst and prepared to document it. The approach was forensic, developed in response to the persistent delay between Arctic events and their acceptance in London. Where Rae had returned with testimony that official Britain rejected, McClintock would return with testimony supported by objects, with objects arranged in narrative sequence, with a case that could not be dismissed as misunderstanding or mistranslation.

The cost of this preparation was measured in more than pounds sterling. The Fox’s outfitting consumed the remaining public patience for the Franklin question. Subscription rates slowed as the vessel neared readiness; the novelty of the search had faded, replaced by a sense that its object was morbid rather than heroic. Lady Franklin’s persistence, once admired as devotion, began to appear to some observers as fixation, a refusal to accept conclusions that reasonable people had drawn. The expedition sailed against this undertow of diminished interest, its funding adequate but its social capital depleted. What sustained it was the widow’s determination and the commander’s commitment, a private alliance against public fatigue.

The final preparations converged in the early months of 1857. The Fox was pronounced ready: sheathed, stored, manned, and equipped for two years in the ice. McClintock received his sailing orders, drawn in Lady Franklin’s hand and countersigned by the Admiralty as formal license. The crew assembled at Southampton, their personal gear stowed, their sledges broken down for loading, their dogs—acquired at Greenland, not England—awaiting transport. The vessel represented a precise quantity of hope, capital, and expertise, mobilized for a specific hypothesis about where 129 men had gone and what had become of them.

The selection of Francis Leopold McClintock from among available Arctic veterans reflected Lady Franklin’s particular requirements for this mission. She needed competence and compatibility—a commander who would accept direction from a civilian patron, who would treat the search as personal obligation rather than professional opportunity, who would understand that the expedition’s purpose extended beyond geographical discovery to the recovery of reputation. McClintock’s previous service had demonstrated technical proficiency without the independence of command that might have bred resistance to her oversight. His career trajectory, stalled by the very Arctic service that had given him expertise, made him available in ways that more senior officers were not. The match was pragmatic on both sides: she offered command he could not otherwise obtain; he offered skills she could not find elsewhere.

The crew’s composition revealed similar calculations. McClintock selected men who had learned Arctic travel through hardship rather than theory—individuals who had survived ice winters, who understood that equipment failed and improvisation became necessity. The ice master William Hobson, who would command the critical sledge party that found the Victory Point record, had served under Collinson and knew the western approaches to King William Island from unsuccessful previous attempts. The surgeon John P. Coghlan had treated the injuries that Arctic service inflicted: frostbite necrosis, scurvy hemorrhage, psychological deterioration from isolation. These were not young men seeking adventure; they were veterans investing accumulated knowledge in a final attempt at resolution. Their ages clustered in their thirties and forties—mature professionals rather than ambitious juniors.

The equipment decisions that occupied 1856 and early 1857 reflected McClintock’s operational philosophy, developed through years of sledge travel. He rejected the heavy boats that naval expeditions had dragged across ice, preferring lighter craft that could be portaged by smaller parties. He specified pemmican in the quantities that Rae’s experience had established as minimal survival rations, accepting the risk of weight reduction against the certainty of caloric need. The clothing orders followed patterns developed by the Hudson’s Bay Company rather than naval tradition: loose layers that permitted evaporation, footwear designed for snow rather than deck, hooded outer garments that protected the face without restricting vision. Each specification represented a choice between competing Arctic traditions—the naval assumption of ship-based operations versus the overland methods that Rae and Inuit practice had validated.

The geographical focus on King William Island emerged from a systematic review of Inuit testimony that McClintock conducted in consultation with John Rae. The accounts gathered between 1852 and 1858, though inconsistent in detail, established a pattern of European presence along the island’s southern and western coasts that no official expedition had investigated. McClintock’s planning assumed that Franklin’s ships had been beset in Victoria Strait, that the crews had abandoned them for the southern shore, and that any surviving records would be found in cairns or cached near points where the retreat had faltered. This hypothesis directed his sledge routes: west along the island’s southern coast to Victory Point, then north and west toward Simpson Strait, searching for physical traces of the overland retreat. The plan assumed that written documents would survive where human bodies had not, that the Navy’s requirement for official confirmation could be satisfied by paper rather than survivors.

The financial administration of the expedition revealed Lady Franklin’s colonial experience in its most precise form. She maintained separate accounts for capital expenditure—the vessel purchase and permanent modifications—and operating costs that would recur if the search extended beyond a single season. The subscription fund’s income, supplemented by her personal resources, was allocated with contingency reserves that acknowledged Arctic uncertainty: funds for additional provisions if ice conditions delayed return, for charter of relief vessels if the Fox failed to emerge, for support of dependents if crew members did not survive. This structure, documented in the expedition’s published accounts, demonstrated management skills developed through years of constrained colonial budgets in Van Diemen’s Land, applied now to a project whose costs were measured in human lives as well as pounds sterling.

The relationship between patron and commander evolved through correspondence during the preparation period.

On a morning in early July 1857, the Fox cast off from England. The expedition ship, the steam schooner Fox, bought via public subscription, sailed from Aberdeen on 2 July 1857. The departure was not the public spectacle of 1845; no crowds lined the shore, no royal salute marked the sailing. A steam yacht of 177 tons, headed for waters that had consumed larger and better-equipped vessels, carrying a crew of twenty-five on a mission the state had abandoned. The vessel’s wake spread across the Channel and faded. What remained was the record of her preparation: the accounts of purchase and outfitting, the correspondence of commander and patron, the plan that directed her toward King William Island and the unexplored coast where testimony suggested answers lay.

The Fox, purchased, outfitted, and manned, was now a physical instrument of resolution, ready to depart for the Arctic.