On the east coast of King William Land M'Clintock met with more Eskimos, from whom he obtained relics and obtained information. Pushing on, he reached Montreal Island on the 15th of May, where the only traces of a boat were some scraps of copper and an iron-hoop bolt. A crossing to the mainland on the 18th of May revealed no more; and next day the return journey began. Six days afterwards, walking along a gravel ridge near the beach on the way to Cape Herschel, M'Clintock found the first skeleton, partly exposed, with a few fragments of clothing appearing through the snow, evidently one of the men who, as the old Eskimo woman said, fell down and died as they walked along. Visiting Simpson's cairn at Cape Herschel and meeting with nothing, he went on for about twelve miles, where he caught sight of a small cairn built by Hobson's party at their furthest south, reached six days before, containing a note with the great news that at Point Victory they had found what is now known as the Franklin record. This record, which has frequently been printed—in a smaller size than the original—was one of the navy bottle-papers with the request in six languages that it should be forwarded to the Admiralty. A pale blue paper, twelve and a half inches by eight, it was filled up in the ordinary way, and then added to round the four margins in the handwriting of Lieutenant Gore, Captain FitzJames, and Captain Crozier, and signed by these and C. F. Des Vœux. It had been first deposited four miles away, so it said, "by the late Commander Gore," in 1847, and next year found by Lieutenant Irving, added to, and removed to the new cairn on the site of Sir James Ross's pillar. [Illustration: DISCOVERY OF THE CAIRN] Brief as it was, it contained all the authentic information regarding Franklin's voyage up to the time the ships were abandoned. Resuming the return journey along the edge of the strait where the meeting of the Pacific and Atlantic tides keeps the ice drifting down from the north-west almost constantly packed, M'Clintock reached a boat with two skeletons and other relics already visited by Hobson, who had found other cairns and many relics, and, in Back Bay, another record by Gore, also deposited in 1847, but giving no additional news. Hobson was dragged alongside the _Fox_, on the 14th of June, so ill with scurvy that he was unable to walk or even stand without assistance. M'Clintock arrived five days later; and on the 27th Allen Young returned after an exploration of three hundred and eighty miles of coast-line, which, added to that discovered by M'Clintock and Hobson, gave a total of eight hundred geographical miles of new coast as the work of the expedition, besides what it had done in clearing up the Franklin mystery.