By the time he wrote his addition to the Victory Point note in April 1848, twenty-four men were dead, including his commander, and the ice had held the ships for nineteen months. He and Crozier and the remaining 105 men were about to begin a march toward safety that none of them completed.
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## The March That Nobody Survived
On April 22, 1848, the survivors abandoned the ships. They moved their supplies onto the ice and began pulling heavy sledges south across King William Island toward the continent. It was an extraordinary physical undertaking under conditions that were already beyond most of the men’s limits.
The force of 105 men — weakened by two winters of cold, inadequate food, and the physical toll of whatever illnesses had killed the first twenty-four — set out in conditions that made survival essentially impossible. King William Island is approximately 150 kilometers long. Beyond it lay the open water of Queen Maud Gulf and the barren mainland coast of the Northwest Territories. The nearest sources of outside help — Hudson’s Bay Company posts on the Back River — were hundreds of kilometers south across terrain with no shelter and minimal food sources.
The men did not make it. No survivor was ever found. No journal from the march was ever recovered.
What was eventually found was the physical evidence left by men dying at various points along the march. Artifacts — cutlery, uniforms, navigational instruments, personal items — were found scattered across King William Island and the adjacent mainland coast over the following decades. Human remains were found at multiple sites. At one location called Starvation Cove, near the mouth of the Back River, bones were recovered, suggesting that some men had reached close to their intended destination before dying.