When John Rae reported that found artifacts and Inuit testimony placed the death of final members of Franklin's lost expedition near Back's Great Fish River in 1850, Lady Jane Franklin called for an expedition to locate these remains.

To be led by McClintock, who had participated in the Arctic explorations of Sir John Ross, Horatio Austin and Henry Kellett,[2] it was the fifth expedition privately financed by Franklin's widow, as by this time the British government had abandoned any hopes of rescue.

Lady Franklin purchased the 177 ton Fox in April 1857, after other efforts to secure a vessel failed.

With an experienced crew of 25, the Fox set sail from Aberdeen on 1 July 1857, after extensive refitting and external sheathing suitable for Arctic service.

They briefly put ashore to several ports on Greenland, sending home an ailing crewman and obtaining coal, dogs, provisions, and Inuit guides Anton Christian and Samuel Emanuel.

Some seal hunting provided sport and extended their sled dogs' rations as they drifted with the pack through August.

By mid-September, they were slowly drifting west among the approaching icebergs, still hoping for liberation to Upernavik, but on 18 September, they began to prepare the ship for winter.

Wildlife, including birds, seals, narwhal and polar bears provided hunting as the crew settled into the winter monotony.

The ship's surgeon, Dr. Walker, conducted schooling for the crew, and a successful November bear hunt produced a skin that was to be presented to Lady Franklin.

December began with the death of a crewman, stoker Robert Scott, who succumbed to injuries following a fall down a hatchway.

By mid-March, open lanes of water had begun to appear, but despite several efforts to free the ship, the Fox was held by the ice until 26 April.

Through Barrow Strait, the Fox passed the same waters that held the Enterprise and Investigator nine years earlier during the McClure Arctic Expedition.

The sled dogs were separated into three teams as land parties—McClintock, Young, and Walker—departed to extend the search on 17 February, with temperatures no less severe.

One of them wore a naval button that came, he said, from a group of Europeans who had starved near a river – Franklin's last survivors, as confirmed by John Rae in 1854.

Some told of a group of survivors from a three-masted ship crushed by the ice west of King William Island, placing them in the same area as described by Rae.

98°41’ This paper was found by Lt. Irving under the cairn supposed to have been built by Sir James Ross in 1831 — 4 miles to the Northward — where it had been deposited by the late Commander Gore in May June 1847.

Sir John Franklin died on the 11th of June 1847 and the total loss by deaths in the Expedition has been to this date 9 officers and 15 men.

In exploring Back Bay into June, Hobson also found a cairn with a second note left by Lieutenant Gore in May 1847, its content similar to the first.

A few members of the crew had developed signs of scurvy, and Thomas Blackwell, the man who first contracted the disease, had perished of it before McClintock's return.

The port of Godhavn on the west coast of Greenland was reached on 29 July, where their Inuit guides were paid and discharged.

[citation needed] McClintock's observations of persistent pack ice in Victoria Strait confirmed the hopelessness of Franklin's attempts to push south through the unexplored passage.

[citation needed] On 30 January 1920, The Pioche Record reported that explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson discovered a lost cache from the 1853 McClintock expedition on Melville Island.