The men of the _Fox_ were worthy of the confidence placed in them. Leaving Aberdeen on the 1st of July, M'Clintock reached Disco on the last day of the month, and, proceeding northwards, was, by a perverse freak of fortune, beset in Melville Bay on the 8th of August, and kept imprisoned thence onwards all through the winter, drifting south through Baffin Bay and Davis Strait. On the 26th of April, 1858, after a drift of 1194 geographical miles, the _Fox_ escaped from the pack and steamed to the eastward amid the most perilous of ice experiences. Most men would have returned and tried again; not so M'Clintock. He boldly ran up the Greenland coast as if nothing had happened and, making good deficiencies, resumed his voyage. Soon after leaving Sanderson's Hope the _Fox_ was nearly wrecked near Buchan Island, remaining on a rock until the tide rose again to set her free. After calling at Beechey Island, M'Clintock followed Franklin's track down Peel Sound until stopped by the pack, when he retraced his course and tried Prince Regent Inlet, reaching Bellot Strait on the 21st of August. At Port Kennedy in this famous waterway—which is like a Greenland fiord, about twenty miles long and scarcely a mile wide at its narrowest part, the water four hundred feet deep within a quarter of a mile of its northern shore—he passed the winter. On the 1st of March he reached by sledge the Magnetic Pole and fell in with four of the Boothian Eskimos, who, at the cost of a needle each, built him a snow hut in an hour, in which they all spent the night. "Perhaps," says M'Clintock, "the records of architecture do not furnish another instance of a dwelling-house so cheaply constructed!" Halting at Cape Victoria the Eskimos came up from their village close by with a number of small relics of the lost expedition. Returning to the _Fox_ after a journey of four hundred and twenty statute miles in which the survey of the west coast of Boothia was completed, everything was made ready for three long sledge journeys of two sledges each, the captain taking that for Montreal Island, and giving Hobson the best chance of promotion by sending him round the west coast of King William Land, while Young took the Prince of Wales Land route.