Ross’s party then began the return journey. He had sought to relieve Franklin, but concern for the health of his own men seriously hindered the efficacy of his search. Despite carrying with them lime juice as an antiscorbutic and the provision of a preferred diet of preserved beef and pea soup, several of his party were now “useless from lameness and debility,” so ill in fact that they had to be hauled on the sledges by the remaining men. M’Clintock recorded that five of the twelve men had “quite broken down.” Upon reaching Port Leopold thirty-nine days after setting out, Ross described his party as “so completely worn out by fatigue that every man was, from some cause or other, in the doctor’s hands for two or three weeks, and I am sorry to say that two of them are not yet recovered.” Gilpin remarked upon the “haggard looks and the attenuated forms of all of them.”
Unknowingly, at the furthest point of this sledge trek, Ross’s party came within 200 miles (320 km) of where Franklin’s ships had been deserted the previous summer. Ross had travelled south along Peel Sound, the very route that Franklin had taken in 1846. Later, M’Clintock lamented this failure, “because we were marching in the right direction, as [subsequent] discoveries… have proved.”
Other sledging parties were also dispatched from the two ships, though as Ross later discovered, “The labours of these parties were of comparatively short durations; still they, like ourselves, all suffered from snow blindness, sprained ankles, and debility.” One of the search parties travelled down the west shore of Prince Regent Inlet to Fury Beach, but the rigours of the journey also resulted in breakdowns in the health of some in the party. They did locate Somerset House, the structure occupied by the men under old Sir John Ross in 1832–33, and found it still standing. A tent was erected inside, fires were lit for warmth and two men—who were “too much fatigued to go any further”—were left as temporary occupants. The remainder of the party travelled only 25 miles (40 km) farther before erecting a cairn and returning to collect the invalids. The stores of the Fury were then examined and the contents tested. The tinned soup was declared “as good as when manufactured… most delicious, and in flavour and consistency, superior to any of our preserves of the same kind.”
While the physical demands of these sledge searches doubtless contributed to the outbreak of illness, those left aboard also fell sick. On 15 June 1849, Henry Mathias, assistant surgeon on the Enterprise, died. The death was blamed on consumption, which, “imperceptibly gaining on his strength, brought him to the grave.” John Robertson wrote that Mathias was “greatly beloved and respected by all in the expedition,” but that there was no hope of “getting him alive out of Port Leopold the grave of so many.” Ross observed: “Several others of the crews of both ships were in a declining state, and the general report of health was by no means cheering.” Even the Enterprises surgeon fell seriously ill. Robertson wrote that he suffered from scurvy and only “narrowly escaped destruction,” though he would continue to suffer active symptoms of “this abominable scourge” seven months later, even after his return to England.
There was another death on 8 July.
Before the ships departed from Port Leopold, Ross ordered that a depot be established. In it, he left behind a steam launch (with fuel), a shelter with carpenter’s tools, blankets, sleeping bags, stoves, provisions and other essential supplies, and an account of the expedition and its future plans. Gilpin: “Here then should any of Sir John Franklin’s people reach, they would find the means of subsistence and escape.”
After departing Port Leopold, Ross attempted to travel west, but the ships were beset on 1 September and carried by ice towards Baffin Bay. After three weeks they were freed, but with the intensifying malevolence of the disease amongst his men, Ross was forced to cut his losses, abandon his search and make a run for home. The Investigator’s cook died on 16 September during the homeward passage; the last case appeared less than a week before the ships limped into the English port of Scarborough in November 1849. Some of the sailors remained ill enough to require hospitalization, and one died shortly afterwards.
On 17 November, the Illustrated London News announced the expedition’s disappointing results, reporting the “great difficulty” encountered by the sledge parties and noting the deaths: “The assistant-surgeon, a very intelligent young man, and three able seamen of the Enterprise, with three of the crew of the Investigator, have died since the vessel left Woolwich in the spring of 1848.” The Athenaeum declared the search for Franklin “very incomplete”:
…the public mind can arrive at no conclusion for its anxiety from what has been done. But the issue of such examination as Sir James Ross has been enabled to institute makes a painful addition to the melancholy suggestions arising out of the long and deathlike silence which has fallen over the former Expedition.
Ross’s own health was broken. While many critics felt he should have braved a second winter, lamenting his “puny efforts,” John Robertson, the surgeon on the Enterprise, thought most of the men would not have survived another year:
There were few men in the ship who were not more or less afflicted by scurvy, and I cannot help fearing that had we remained out an other winter, few if any would have ever returned—this the more certain since our antiscorbutics proved such perfect failures.
One officer on the expedition wrote: “We have certainly had to grapple with difficulties of no ordinary nature.” Years later, M’Clintock reflected that “we underwent as much privation and fatigue as in any equal period of my subsequent travel.” Yet the truth was that Ross’s expedition was the only one with at least a theoretical chance of saving some of Franklin’s men. When his ships reached Port Leopold, some of the men may still have been alive; with Ross’s defeat, any chance of their being saved was lost.
Struggling to understand the severity of the sickness suffered aboard Ross’s ships, some historians have theorized that the problem might have been compounded by the crews being accepted for the expedition without medical examinations. Ross’s own officers complained that the ships’ canned provisions were not only underweight but of inferior quality, in Robertson’s words, “a disgrace to the contractor.” The same contractor—Stephan Goldner—had supplied Franklin’s expedition. Doubts about the antiscorbutic value of the lime juice carried on-ship were also raised, with subsequent chemical analysis concluding that there was no guarantee of “the initial soundness of the fruit.” This grave conclusion unfastened an exhaustive inquiry by Sir William Burnett, the navy’s medical director-general. All juice then in the victualling stores was analyzed, with the conclusion that it was all below the proper standard of acidity. It was, of course, a mistake to suppose that acidity was the vital element.
In the end, the Admiralty attributed the health problems that beset the expedition, and the unusual number of deaths, to scurvy. Ross, who had seen scurvy’s effects on some of his earlier expeditions, was unconvinced. He pointedly did not use the word “scurvy” in his official report of the expedition nor, indeed, did his men when later examined, saying that there had been “debility but no scurvy.” The ferocity of the illness was unequalled in nineteenth-century Arctic exploration. Not even Franklin’s expedition during its first year came close to experiencing the crippling losses encountered by James Clark Ross’s during its lone Arctic winter; at one point, twenty-six men were on the sick list. The mortality on Ross’s expedition was more than twice that of Franklin’s 1845–46 winter losses.