From the direction in which the boat’s head was pointing, and from its contents, M’Clintock concluded that the party attached to it had started out for the Great Fish River, but, finding themselves too utterly worn out to proceed far, had turned back intending to make their way to the ship. Unable to drag the boat any further, they had left it where it was found by the explorers, meaning to bring back food to their two companions who had been obliged, through weakness, to remain behind. The fact that five watches were left in the boat points to the conclusion that they had not thought of abandoning it finally. Overcome by cold and fatigue, however, they must have perished on the way. After leaving the boat, M’Clintock pushed on his way with all possible dispatch, searching for traces of the wrecked ship as he went, but without success. He reached Point Victory on June 2, and there he found a note from Hobson, telling him that he had met with no better fortune in the execution of this part of his mission, but that he had found a duplicate of the record which we have already described. M’Clintock spent some little time in examining the cairn under which the paper had been discovered, and found strewn about it a vast variety of such miscellaneous articles as cooking-stoves, pickaxes, shovels, four feet of a copper lightning conductor, long pieces of brass curtain rods, a medicine chest, and some scientific instruments. There was also a pile of clothing four feet high, of which every article was searched. The pockets, however, were all empty, and not a single piece of the clothing was marked with its owner’s name. “These abandoned superfluities,” M’Clintock writes, “afford the saddest and most convincing proof that here—on this spot—our doomed and scurvy-stricken countrymen calmly prepared themselves to struggle manfully for life.” There was now nothing left for M’Clintock but to return to the _Fox_, and this he accordingly did with all possible speed, reaching Bellot Strait on June 18. On the return journey he learned from a note left at one of the depots that Hobson had been taken seriously ill, and had grown so feeble that it had been found necessary to place him on one of the sledges. To his great relief he heard, on reaching the ship, that the scurvy from which his junior was suffering had already yielded to treatment, and that he was on the high road to recovery.