You’re thinking of the Greely expedition (Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, 1881–84). It hits almost every beat: a US Army party posted to Fort Conger on northern Ellesmere Island — right above Canada, across the channel from Greenland — dropped off by the SS Proteus, a steam-powered Arctic sealer out of St. John’s. Relief ships couldn’t get through, so in 1883 they retreated south in small boats, abandoned the boats, and drifted around Smith Sound on an ice floe before making camp at Cape Sabine — Smith Sound being literally the water between Canada and Greenland. Then they starved through the winter. Nineteen of the twenty-five men were lost to starvation, drowning, hypothermia, amputation, cannibalism, and one execution — Greely himself barely made it.

The ship angle checks out too: one relief ship got caught in ice two hundred miles south, and another splintered in the ice pack (that was the Proteus, crushed).

The name is the mangled part. My guess: “Martin” bled in from Martin Frobisher (the other famous Baffin-via-Greenland guy, who did not starve), and “Gatineau” from Marc Garneau. Your brain made a Franco-Canadian smoothie.

Runner-up if the red-and-white icebreaker is the strongest part of the memory: that’s Canadian Coast Guard paint, and the CCGS Sir Wilfrid Laurier was all over the 2014 news footage when they found HMS Erebus — Franklin’s expedition, whose 128 men disappeared searching for the Northwest Passage and starved in the ice above Canada. So: one guy or a whole crew — which do you remember?