Introduction - 002
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Next April the sun returned and so did the morale of the men but the ice refused to thaw. With the two ships icebound and drifting with the pack (east of the Barrow Straights), all exploration to find the Investigator and her crew had to be undertaken by sledge. Lady luck was watching them Leopold McClintock found the Investigator after travelling for over one thousand miles over land. This mission saved the life of the ships crew and confirmed beyond doubt that the North West Passage existed. One of the puzzles of the Victorian era had at last been unlocked.
Another winter had to be endured in unbearable climatic conditions, food was becoming a dilemma and scurvy was starting to affect the sailors, the lack of fresh fruit, vegetables and half rations were taking their revenge. With the arrival of spring the next year and the strong prospect of the pack ice not breaking up in the summer, the orders of Captain Belcher to abandon the Resolute and Intrepid had to be obeyed.
So on May 15th 1853 with no new information on the disappearance of Sir Franklin or his crew, George McDougall and the surviving forty-two sailors set off overland, hand pulling their laden sledges over the slushy pack ice to locate the rest of the expedition and the floating refuge, situated off Beechey Island. They trekked by foot for one month, encountering conditions that today we would class as impossible before the crews of Assistance and Pioneer, who had also abandoned their ships due to the pack ice, at last discovered McDougall and the other sailors, suffering from frostbite and exhaustion only ten miles from their goal. The Arctic Squadron was now down to one ship, it was the end of the Arctic Searching Expedition, leaving only one unpopular course open to Captain Sir Edward Belcher; a return to England on The North Star.
The following summer Mother Nature gave her own twist to the tale by letting the abandoned Resolute float free from the grip of the ice. Over the next twenty-four months she drifted, without a soul on board or a stitch of canvas set, for over one thousand miles. On the 10th September 1855 James M. Buddington sited her from the American whaler George Henry on the northern shores of the Davis Straits. Captain Buddington decided that she would fetch a high salvage prize, so after following her for a few days she was boarded with a skeleton crew and sailed back to the United States before bring sold to Congress for $40.000.
The American government then refitted the Resolute down to the finest detail; even the officer's libraries had been restored. On completion of the work they sent her back across the Atlantic as a private gesture to Queen Victoria and a token of respect between the two nations. The days of this great ship were numbered; her time as a means of transport concluded, so eventually she was broken for her wood and left to rest. As a sign of appreciation to the United States, fragments of the ship’s timbers were used to make a desk, which was presented to the then President of the United States; Rutherford B Hayes. It can now be found in the Oval Room of the White House, where it has been in permanent use since President John F. Kennedy’s term of office.