In May 1859, Captain Leopold McClintock’s Arctic search expedition has spent eight brutal months icebound near Bellot Strait, with frostbite and scurvy thinning the men. With the sun returned, sledging becomes possible again, and Lieutenant Hobson is sent south along King William Land to follow reports about the missing Franklin expedition.

Hobson carries grim testimony from local Esquimaux who claim that, years earlier, they saw a starving remnant of Franklin’s men and found signs of desperate cannibalism at abandoned camps. The rumors sharpen Hobson’s dread as he travels, imagining what starvation could drive men to do.

At Cape Felix, Hobson discovers a seemingly orderly camp with scientific instruments and supplies, suggesting an observatory used in summer. The site’s most striking feature is how abruptly it was abandoned, leaving valuable Royal Navy property behind without explanation.

Continuing south, Hobson finds a stone cairn containing the only known written communication from Franklin’s expedition: a note written in two stages on Admiralty paper. The first, confident message reports that Erebus and Terror wintered safely and that a party of two officers and six men left the ships on 24 May 1847, signed by Lieutenant Graham Gore and Charles Des Voeux.

A later, marginal addition dated April 1848 reports that the ships were deserted and that the remaining 105 men, under Captain Francis Crozier and Captain James Fitzjames, began an eight-hundred-mile overland march; it also records Sir John Franklin’s death in June 1847 and heavy losses. The note further states that Gore—promoted to Commander—had already died before the march began, confirming that none of the expedition’s leadership and crew survived in any meaningful way.