The 12th August found the little _Fox_ in Melville Bay made fast to an iceberg, and a few days later she was frozen firmly into an ice-pack. For two hundred and forty-two days she was beset, drifting all through the long, bitter winter with the ice, till on 25th April 1858, after having been carried over a thousand miles, she was released. McClintock, undaunted by danger, turned northwards, and by May he had reached Melville Bay. Thence up Lancaster Sound, he reached Beechey Island in August and found there three lonely graves of three sailors from the _Erebus_ and _Terror_. Here the English commander erected a tablet sent out by Lady Franklin. [Illustration: THE THREE GRAVES ON BEECHEY ISLAND. From McClintock's _Voyage in Search of Franklin_.] On the morning of 16th August, McClintock sailed from Beechey Island, but the short summer was passing quickly and they had no fresh news of the Franklin expedition. Half-way through Bellot Strait the _Fox_ was again icebound, and another long winter had to be faced. By the middle of February 1859 there was light enough to start some sledging along the west coast of Boothia Felix. Days passed and McClintock struggled on to the south, but no Eskimos appeared and no traces of the lost explorers were to be found. Suddenly they discovered four men walking after them. A naval button on one of the Eskimos attracted their attention. "It came," said the Eskimo, "from some white people who were starved upon an island where there are salmon, but none of them had seen the white men." Here was news at last--McClintock travelled on some ten miles to Cape Victoria, where the Eskimos built him a "commodious snow-hut in half an hour." Next morning the entire village of Eskimos arrived--some forty-five people--bringing relics of the white men. There were silver spoons, part of a gold chain, buttons, knives made of the iron and wood of the wrecked ships. But none of these people had seen the white men--one man said he had seen their bones upon the island where they died, but some were buried. They said a ship "having three masts had been crushed by the ice out in the sea to the west of King William's Island." One old man made a rough sketch of the coast-line with his spear upon the snow; he said it was eight journeys to where the ship sank. McClintock hastened back to the ship with his news--he had by his sleigh-journey added one hundred and twenty miles to the old charts and "completed the discovery of the coast-line of Continental America." [Illustration: EXPLORING PARTIES STARTING FROM THE _FOX_. From McClintock's _Voyage of the_ "Fox" _in Search of Franklin_.]