A fragment of wood with tar deposits attached from the 1845 British Northwest Passage Expedition led by Sir John Franklin.

The fragment of timber is one of a number of pieces of wood found in deserted snow huts. However, there are three occasions when deserted snow huts were located by Captain F. L. McClintock's sledge team. The first was on 4 May 1859 on the south-west side of Matty Island where McClintock 'found shavings or chips of different kinds of wood from the lost expedition'. The second time was a single snow hut that had 'various articles of wood lying about it' that they found on 10 May 1859. The final set of deserted snow huts were found around 6 June 1859 along Wellington Strait, near Cape Norton before McClintock recrossed to the Boothia Peninsula. McClintock records 'Strewed about on the ice or in every snow hut were shavings and chips of fresh wood...' In the appendix to his account McClintock assigns the wood to deserted snow huts near Cape Norton in May 1859, and wrote 'Taken out of some deserted snow huts near here, some scraps of different kinds of wood, such as could not be obtained from a boat - teak or African oak' [McClintock, Voyage of the Fox (1859), pages 257, 264, 308 and 370].

The wood includes a label with '33' on it, indicating that it was displayed at the Royal Naval Museum, Greenwich, Case 2, No. 33. 'Scraps of wood from a deserted snow hut'. The item is not shown in - 'Stereoscopic slides of the relics of Sir John Franklin's Expedition' photographed by Lieutenant Cheyne RN, at the United Services Museum, Whitehall. However, other small pieces of timber are shown in the photograph, either side and below the Inuit-made model wooden sledge.