He reached the magnetic pole without seeing any one, his dogs in such fearful plight that he could advance but one day farther. Six of the dogs were then useless, and during the journey the poor animals had so suffered from poor food, intense cold, and bad snow that several of them had repeatedly fallen down in fits. When he was quite in despair, several Eskimos returning from a seal hunt crossed his trail and visited his camp. From the winter colony of forty-five Boothians he gained his first tidings of the missing explorers. One native said that a three-masted ship had been crushed by ice to the west of King William Land, but the crew came safe to shore. Another told of white men who starved on an island (probably Montreal) where salmon came. That the men had perished was quite clear from the abundance of Franklin relics among the Eskimos--buttons, knives, forks, McDonald's medal and a gold chain, which McClintock bought at the average price of one needle each. None of the Inuits had seen the whites, but one native had seen some of their skeletons. An example of the disregard of the natives for extreme cold made McClintock shiver with pity and anger. He says: "One pertinacious old dame pulled out her infant by the arm from the back of her large fur dress, and quietly held the poor little creature, perfectly naked, before me in the breeze, the temperature at the time being sixty degrees below the freezing-point." McClintock at once gave her a needle, for which she was thus begging, but was considerably alarmed for the infant's safety before it was restored to the warmth of its mother's fur hood. Active sledging, meantime, by Young, Walker, and Hobson, had no results beyond snow-blindness, freezings, and other suffering for these resolute and efficient officers. McClintock himself, on his return, was scarred by frost-bites, his fingers calloused by frequent freezings, and his body thin with scant food, which made him eat, Boothian fashion, "frozen blubber in delicate little slices." These physical hardships were as nothing in return for the mental satisfaction of tidings of Franklin, with intimations as to the locality of the regions in which further research would doubtless produce results. He was determined to explore the whole King William region, and thus obtain further information as to the fate of the second ship. McClintock then outfitted his sledge party for a journey of eighty-four days, with Hobson as assistant, while Young was to establish supporting depots of food, the field of operations to be southwest of the magnetic pole.