Adventures of a Sea Hunter_ In Search of Famous Shipwrecks - James P. Delgado [87]
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,