. 98 deg. 41'.'

No words could convey better than these simple lines the full horror of
the disaster: two winters frozen in the ice-pack till the {133} lack of
food and the imminence of starvation compelled the officers and men to
leave the ships long before the summer season and try to make their way
over ice and snow to the south! And Franklin? The other edge of the
paper contained in the same writing a note that ran: 'Sir John Franklin
died on the 11th June 1847 and the total loss by death to the
expedition has been to date 9 officers and 14 men. F. R. M. Crozier,
Captain and Senior Officer. James Fitzjames, Captain H.M.S.
_Erebus_.' At one corner of the paper are the final words that, taken
along with the stories of the Eskimos, explained the last chapter of
the tragedy--'and start to-morrow 26th for Back's Fish River.'

M'Clintock did all that could be done. He and his party traced out the
coast on both sides of King William's Island, and, having reached the
mouth of the Back river, he traced the course of Crozier and his
perishing companions step by step backwards over the scene of the
disaster. The Eskimos whom he met told him of the freezing in of the
two great ships: how the white men had abandoned them and walked over
the ice: how one ship had been crushed in the ice a few months later
and had gone down: and how the other ship {134} had lain a wreck for
years and years beside the coast of King William's Island. One aged
woman who had visited the scene told M'Clintock's party that there had
been on the wrecked ship the dead body of a tall man with long teeth
and large bones.

The searchers themselves found more direct testimony still. A few
miles south of Cape Herschel lay the skeleton of one of Franklin's men,
outstretched on the ground, just as he had fallen on the fatal march,
the head pointing towards the Back river. At another point there was
found a boat with two corpses in it, the one lying in the stern
carefully covered as if by the act of his surviving comrade, the other
lying in the bow, two loaded muskets standing upright beside the body.
A great number of relics that marked the path of Crozier's men were
found along the shore of King William's Island. In one place a
plundered cairn was discovered. But, strangely enough, no document or
writing to tell anything of the fate of the survivors after they
started on their last march. That all perished by the way there can be
little doubt.