The results were exactly as we have indicated. M’Clintock examined the whole of the east coast and the estuary of the Great Fish River with the utmost care, but, with the exception of an occasional relic obtained from the natives, his search was fruitless. He accordingly crossed the strait on May 24, and proceeded to link up his own explorations with those of Hobson. On the following day his patience was at last rewarded, for, while slowly walking along a gravel ridge near the beach, which the winds kept unusually bare of snow, he came upon a skeleton partly exposed. From the clothing that lay near by he gathered that the victim must have been a steward or officer’s servant, who, selecting the bare ridge-top as affording less tiresome walking, had fallen on his face in the position in which his skeleton was found. It may here be said that an old woman with whom M’Clintock communicated on his outward journey had told him that the unfortunate explorers had “fallen down and died as they walked along.” Of the melancholy truth of her words this discovery afforded a terrible confirmation. At Cape Herschel M’Clintock found the cairn erected by Simpson, and this he demolished in the hope that the missing explorers might have left some record there, but he found nothing. Twelve miles further on he learnt that that for which he had been searching so diligently had been discovered, for he came upon a second cairn of more recent construction—the cairn which marked the end of Hobson’s brilliantly successful journey. In penetrating thus far Hobson had passed the point at which the _Erebus_ and _Terror_ had been abandoned, and had found the first, and, indeed, the only important record of the journey which it fell to the lot of a white man to discover. The record, which was enclosed in a tin box and found beside a tumbled cairn, was brief enough, but it contained the whole history of the ill-fated expedition. It consisted merely of one of those printed Government forms which were supplied to all discovery ships. These forms were intended to be filled up with intimations of discoveries, accident or distress, and then to be enclosed in a bottle and thrown into the sea or else buried under a cairn. A note at the head, written in several different languages, requested the finder to forward the paper to the Secretary of the Admiralty, or, if more convenient, to hand it over to the nearest British consul, with an intimation concerning the time and place at which it had been found. It was on one of these that Franklin’s officers had made their last communication to the world. The contents of the document ran as follows:— “H.M. ships _Erebus_ and _Terror_, Wintered in the ice in lat. 70° 5´ N., long. 98° 23´ W. 28th of May 1847. Having wintered in 1846-7 at Beechey Island in lat. 74° 43´ 28´´ N., long. 91° 39´ 5´´ W., after having ascended Wellington Channel to lat. 77°, and returned by the west side of Cornwallis Island.