Francis McClintock: Discovering What Happened to 129 Missing Men

For twelve years, the world wondered what happened to Sir John Franklin and 129 men who vanished searching for the Northwest Passage. Dozens of rescue missions found nothing. Then Francis Leopold McClintock sailed north on a small yacht called the Fox — funded not by the government, but by Franklin's widow. What he found on King William Island ended the mystery and horrified the world. Scattered bones. Abandoned boats filled with strange cargo. A single handwritten note that told the final chapter: Franklin was dead. The ships were crushed. The survivors had walked south into oblivion. McClintock brought back the only written record of the expedition's fate — a few lines scrawled in the margin of a naval form, left in a stone cairn at the edge of the world. This account is drawn from McClintock's expedition journals, his published narrative "The Voyage of the Fox," ship logs, and contemporary reports from the period. 🎧 This is an audio documentary. Best experienced with headphones.