Dr. Kane informs us that the most picturesque portion of the coast occurs in the neighbourhood of Dallas Bay. Here the red sandstones contrast very favourably with the blank whiteness, and associate the warm colours of more southern lands with the cold tints of the Arctic scenery. The seasons have acted on the different layers of the cliff so as to give them all the appearance of jointed masonry, and the narrow stratum of greenstone at the top surmounts them with boldly-designed battlements. To one of these “interesting freaks of Nature” Kane gave the name of the “Three Brother Turrets.” The crumbled ruin at the foot of the coast-wall led up, like an artificial causeway, to a ravine that blazed at noonday with the glow of the southern sun, when everywhere else the rock lay in blackest shadow. Just at the edge of this lane of light rose the semblance of a castle, flanked with triple towers, completely isolated and defined. These were the Three Turrets.

Still further to the north, a solitary cliff of greenstone, marked by the slaty limestone that once encased it, sprang from a mass of broken sandstone, like the rough-hewn rampart of an ancient city. At its northern extremity, on the brink of a deep ravine, wrought out among the ruin, stood a solitary column, or minaret-tower, the pedestal of which was not less than 280 feet in height, while the shaft was fully 480 feet. Dr. Kane associated this remarkable beacon with the name of the poet Tennyson.

Dr. Kane continued his advance, and on the 4th of May approached the Great Glacier. This progress, however, was dearly earned. Owing to the excessive cold and labour, most of his party suffered from painful prostration; three were attacked with snow-blindness; and all were troubled with dropsical swellings. Off Cape Kent, while taking an observation for latitude, Kane himself was seized with a sudden pain, and fainted. His limbs became rigid. He was strapped upon the sledge, and insisted that the march should be continued. But, on the 5th, he grew delirious, and fainting every time that he was taken from the tent to the sledge, he succumbed entirely.

“My comrades,” writes this heroic man, than whom no braver or more resolute spirit ever ventured into the dreary Northern wilds, “would kindly persuade me that, even had I continued sound, we could not have proceeded on our journey. The snows were very heavy, and increasing as we went; some of the drifts perfectly impassable, and the level floes often four feet deep in yielding snow. The scurvy had already broken out among the men, with symptoms like my own; and Morton, our strongest man, was beginning to give way. It is the reverse of comfort to me that they shared my weakness. All that I should remember with pleasurable feeling is, that to five brave men, themselves scarcely able to travel, I owe my preservation.”

They carried him back to the brig at Rensselaer Harbour, and for several days he lay fluctuating between life and death. As the summer came on, however, his health slowly improved; and though unable to undertake any sledge excursions in person, he organized a series of expeditions in which his stronger companions took part. Dr. Hayes crossed the strait in a north-easterly direction, reached the opposite coast of Grinnell Land, where the cliffs varied from 1200 to 2000 feet in height, and surveyed it as far as Cape Fraser, in lat. 79° 45’.

He returned on June 1st, and, a few days later, Morton departed to survey the Greenland shore beyond the Humboldt Glacier. His journey was a difficult one, for the obstacles offered by the ice hummocks were sometimes almost insurmountable, and the ice-field was intersected by chasms and water-lanes frequently four feet in width. After skirting the coast of what is now known as Morris Bay, Morton’s party came upon easier ground; and presently a long low country opened on the land-ice, a wide plain between large headlands, with rolling hills through it. A flock of brent geese came down this valley, with a whirr of wings, and ducks were seen in crowds upon the open water. Eiders and dove-kies also made their appearance; and tern were very numerous, and exceedingly tame. Flying high overhead, their notes echoing from the rocks, were large white birds, which Morton supposed to be burgomasters. There were also ivory gulls and mollemokes; the former flying very high, and the latter winging their way far out to sea.

The channel (Kennedy Channel) was here unobstructed by ice, and its waves rolled freely and noisily on the shore. Along its verdant margin Morton proceeded warily, and on the 26th of June, 1854, reached the striking headland of Cape Constitution, about 2000 feet in height. Its base was washed by a tremendous surf, through which it was impossible to pass—the ne plus ultra, as it seemed, of human enterprise. Climbing from rock to rock, he contrived to reach an elevation of 300 feet; from which he was able to trace the outline of the coast for fifty miles to the north. In the distance rose a range of mountains, very lofty, and rounded at their summits. To the north-west might be seen a bare peak, striated vertically with protruding ridges, and soaring to an altitude of between 2500 and 3000 feet. This peak, the most remote northern land then known upon the globe, was named after the great pioneer of Arctic travel, Sir Edward Parry.

The range (Victoria and Albert Mountains) with which it was connected was much higher, Morton thought, than any they had seen on the southern or Greenland side of the bay. The summits were generally rounded, resembling a succession of sugar-loaves and stacked cannonballs declining slowly in the perspective.

All the sledge-parties were now once more aboard the brig, and the season of Arctic travel had ended. The short summer was rapidly wearing away, and yet the ice remained a rigid and impenetrable barrier. It was evident that the ship could not be liberated, and Kane found himself compelled to decide between two equally dismal alternatives,—the abandonment of the ship, or another winter among the Polar snows. For himself, he resolved to remain; but to those who were willing to venture on the attempt to reach the Danish settlement at Upernavik, he left the choice open. Out of the seventeen survivors of the party, eight, like Dr. Kane, decided to stand by the brig; the others, to push southward to Upernavik. These were provided with all the provisions and appliances that could be spared, and took their departure on Monday, August 28th; carrying with them a written assurance of a brother’s welcome should they be driven back—an assurance amply redeemed when severe trials had prepared them to share again the fortunes of their commander.

Dr. Kane confronted the winter with equal sagacity and resolution. He had carefully studied the Eskimos, and concluded that their form of habitation and peculiarities of diet, without their unthrift and filth, were the safest that could be adopted. He turned the brig, therefore, into a kind of igloë, or hut. The quarter-deck was well padded with moss and turf, and the cabin below, a space some eighteen feet square, was enclosed and packed from floor to ceiling with inner walls of the same material. The floor itself was carefully calked with plaster of Paris and common paste, and covered two inches deep with Manilla oakum and a canvas carpet. The entrance was from the hold by a low, moss-lined tunnel, the tossut of the native huts, with as many doors and curtains to close it up as ingenuity could devise. This was their sitting-room, dining-room, sleeping-room; but there were only ten of them, and the closer the warmer.

While they were engaged in these defences against the enemy, they contrived to open up a friendly intercourse with the Eskimos, visiting them in their snow-huts at the settlements of Etah and Anatoak, distant about thirty and seventy miles from the brig; and, in return for presents of needles, pins, and knives, they undertook to show the white strangers where game was to be procured, as well as to furnish walrus and fresh seal meat. The assistance rendered by the Eskimos was of the greatest value, and we may infer that, without it, Dr. Kane and his followers must have succumbed to the hardships of that dreadful winter.

On the 12th of December, the party which had abandoned the ship suddenly reappeared, finding it impossible to penetrate to the south. They had suffered severely; were covered with rime and snow, and fainting with hunger. It was necessary to use much caution in conveying them below; for after an exposure of such fearful intensity and duration as they had undergone, the warmth of the cabin would have prostrated them completely. They had journeyed three hundred and fifty miles; and their last run from the bay near Etah, some seventy miles in a right line, was through the hummocks with the thermometer at -50°. “One by one,” says Kane, “they all came in and were housed. Poor fellows! as they threw open their Eskimo garments by the stove, how they relished the scanty luxuries which we had to offer. The coffee, and the meat-biscuit soup, and the molasses, and the wheat-bread, even the salt pork, which our scurvy forbade the rest of us to touch—how they relished it all! For more than two months they had lived on frozen seal and walrus meat.”

We cannot dwell on the various little incidents which marked that sad and terrible winter, but an extract or two from Dr. Kane’s journal will show the reader how much the imprisoned explorers endured, and in what spirit they bore their trials:—

“December 1, Friday.—I am writing at midnight. I have the watch from eight to two. It is day in the moonlight on deck, the thermometer getting up again to 36° below zero. As I come down to the cabin—for so we still call this little moss-lined igloë of ours—every one is asleep, snoring, gritting his teeth, or talking in his dreams. This is pathognomonic; it tells of Arctic winter, and its companion, scurvy. Tom Hickey, our good-humoured, blundering cabin-boy, decorated with the dignities of cook, is in that little dirty cot on the starboard side; the rest are bedded in rows. Mr. Brooks and myself chock aft. Our bunks are close against the frozen moss-wall, where we can take in the entire family at a glance. The apartment measures twenty feet by eighteen; its height six feet four inches at one place, but diversified elsewhere by beams crossing at different distances from the floor. The avenue by which it is approached is barely to be seen in the moss-wall forward; twenty feet of air-tight space make misty distance, for the puff of outside temperature that came in with me has filled our atmosphere with vesicles of vapour. The avenue—Ben-Djerback is our poetic name for it—closes on the inside with a door well-patched with flannel, from which, stooping upon all fours, you back down a descent of four feet in twelve through a tunnel three feet high, and two feet six inches broad. Arrived at the bottom, you straighten yourself, and a second door admits you into the dark and sorrowing hold, empty of stores, and stripped to its naked ceiling for firewood. From this we grope our way to the main hatch, and mount by a rude stairway of boxes into the open air.”

“February 21, Wednesday.—To-day the crests of the north-east headland were gilded by true sunshine, and all who were able ascended on deck to greet it. The sun rose above the horizon, though still screened from our eyes by intervening hills. Although the powerful refraction of Polar latitudes heralds his direct appearance by brilliant light, this is as far removed from the glorious tints of day as it is from the mere twilight. Nevertheless, for the past ten days we have been watching the growing warmth of our landscape, as it emerged from buried shadow, through all the stages of distinctness of an India-ink washing, step by step, into the sharp, bold definition of our desolate harbour scene. We have marked every dash of colour which the great Painter in his benevolence vouchsafed to us; and now the empurpled blue, clear, unmistakable, the spreading lake, the flickering yellow; peering at all these, poor wretches! everything seemed superlative lustre and unsurpassable glory. We had so grovelled in darkness, that we oversaw the light.

“Mr. Wilson has caught cold, and relapsed. Mr. Ohlsen, after a suspicious day, startles me by an attack of partial epilepsy; one of those strange, indescribable spells, fits, seizures, whatever name the jargon gives them, which indicate deep disturbance. I conceal his case as far as I can; but it adds to my heavy pack of troubles to anticipate the gloomy scenes of epileptic transport introduced into our one apartment.”

“February 28, Wednesday.—February closes: thank God for the lapse of its twenty-eight days! Should the thirty-one of the coming March not drag us further downward, we may hope for a successful close to this dreary drama. By the 10th of April we should have seal; and when they come, if we remain to welcome them, we can call ourselves saved.

“But a fair review of our prospects tells me that I must look the lion in the face. The scurvy is steadily gaining on us. I do my best to sustain the more desperate cases; but as fast as I partially build up one, another is stricken down. The disease is perhaps less malignant than it was, but it is more diffused throughout our party. Except William Morton, who is disabled by a frozen heel, not one of our eighteen is exempt. Of the six workers of our party, as I counted them a month ago, two are unable to do out-door work, and the remaining four divide the duties of the ship among them. Hans musters his remaining energies to conduct the hunt. Petersen is his disheartened, moping assistant. The other two, Bonsall and myself, have all the daily offices of household and hospital. We chop five large sacks of ice, cut six fathoms of eight-inch hawser into junks of a foot each (for fuel), serve out the meat when we have it, hack at the molasses, and hew out with crowbar and axe the pork and dried apples, pass up the foul slops and cleansings of our dormitory; and, in a word, cook, scullionize, and attend the sick. Added to this, for five nights running I have kept watch from 8 P.M. to 4 A.M., catching cat-naps as I could in the day without changing my clothes, but carefully waking every hour to note thermometers.

“Such is the condition in which February leaves us, with forty-one days more ahead of just the same character in prospect as the twenty-eight which, thank God! are numbered now with the past. It is saddening to think how much those twenty-eight days have impaired our capacities of endurance. If Hans and myself can only hold on, we may work our way through. All rests upon destiny, or the Power which controls it.”

It is useless, however, to dwell longer on this melancholy record. Kane saw that to abandon the brig was now the only resource: the ice held it fast, there was no probability of its being released, and a third winter in Rensselaer Bay would have been death to the whole party. As soon, therefore, as the return of spring in some measure recruited the health of his followers, he made the necessary preparations for departure; and on the 20th of May the entire ship’s company bade farewell to the Advance, and set out on their homeward route. With considerable difficulty and arduous labour they hauled their boats across the rough, hummocky ice, and reached the open sea. On the 17th of June they embarked, and steered for Upernavik, which port they calculated upon reaching in fifty-six days. When they got fairly clear of the land, and in the course of the great ice-drift southward, they found their boats so frail and leaky that they could be kept afloat only by constant bailing; a labour which told heavily on men already weakened with disease and want. Starvation stared them in the face, when happily they fell in with and captured a large seal, which they devoured voraciously; and this opportune help recruited their failing energies. Thenceforth they were in no lack of food, as seals were plentiful; and early in August, after living for eighty-four days in the open air, they found themselves under the comfortable roofs of Upernavik, enjoying the hospitable welcome of the generous Danes.

Dr. Kane returned to New York on the 11th of October 1855, after an absence of thirty months. His discoveries had been important, his heroism worthy of the race from which he sprung, and none can deny that he had well merited the honours he received. Unfortunately, a frame never very robust had been broken down by the trials of two Arctic winters; and this gallant explorer passed away on the 16th of February 1857, in the thirty-seventh year of his age.

In 1860, Dr. Hayes, the companion of Dr. Kane, took the command of an expedition intended to complete the survey of Kennedy Channel, and to reach, if it were possible, the North Pole. His schooner, the United States, was brought up for the winter at Port Foulke, about twenty miles south of Rensselaer Harbour; and early in the following April, Dr. Hayes set out on a sledge and boat journey across the sound, and along the shores of Grinnell Land.

From the eloquent record of his adventures, which does so much credit to his literary skill, “An Arctic Boat Journey,” we have already quoted some stirring passages; but the following extract we may be allowed to repeat, on account of the clear light it throws upon the nature of the difficulties Hayes encountered on his northward advance:—

“The track,” he says, “was rough, past description. I can compare it to nothing but a promiscuous accumulation of rocks closely packed together, and piled up over a vast plain in great heaps and endless ridges, leaving scarcely a foot of level surface. The interstices between these closely accumulated ice-masses are filled up, to some extent, with drifted snow. The reader will easily imagine the rest. He will see the sledges winding through the tangled wilderness of broken ice-tables, the men and dogs pulling and pushing up their respective loads. He will see them clambering over the very summit of lofty ridges, through which there is no opening, and again descending on the other side—the sledge often plunging over a precipice, sometimes capsizing, and frequently breaking. Again he will see the party, baffled in their attempt to cross or find a pass, breaking a track with shovel and handspike; or, again, unable even with these appliances to accomplish their end, they retreat to seek a better track: and they may be lucky enough to find a sort of gap or gateway, upon the winding and uneven surface of which they will make a mile or so with comparative ease. The snow-drifts are sometimes a help and sometimes a hindrance. Their surface is uniformly hard, but not always firm to the foot. The crust frequently gives way, and in a most tiresome and provoking manner. It will not quite bear the weight, and the foot sinks at the very moment when the other is lifted. But, worse than this, the chasms between the hummocks are frequently bridged over with snow in such a manner as to leave a considerable space at the bottom quite unfilled; and at the very moment when all looks promising, down sinks one man to his middle, another to the neck, another is buried out of sight; the sledge gives way,—and to extricate the whole from this unhappy predicament is probably the labour of hours. It would be difficult to imagine any kind of labour more disheartening, or which would sooner sap the energies of both men and animals.”

After encountering difficulties like these, which wore out the strength of most of his party, so that they were compelled to return to the schooner, Dr. Hayes succeeded in crossing the sound, and began his journey along the coast. But the difficulties did not abate, and made such demands on the powers of endurance of the travellers, that the strongest among them broke down, and had to be left behind in charge of another of the party. The resolute Hayes then pushed on, accompanied by Knorr, and on the 18th of May reached the margin of a deep gulf, where further progress was rendered impossible by the rotten ice and broad water-ways. From this point, however, he could see, on the other side of the channel, and immediately opposite to him, the lofty peak of Mount Parry, discovered in 1854 by the gallant Morton; and more to the north, a bold conspicuous headland, which he named Cape Union, the most northern known land upon the globe. Beyond it, he thought he saw the open sea of the Pole, which, from Cape Union, is not distant five hundred miles; but the voyage of the Polaris, at a later date, has shown that what he saw was only a land-locked bay.

On the 12th of July, the schooner was set free from the ice, but she proved to be too much damaged to continue her dangerous voyage; and satisfied with having proved that a direct and not impracticable route to the Pole lies up Smith Sound and Kennedy Channel, Dr. Hayes returned to Boston.

It is the opinion, however, of some geographers, though scarcely warranted by ascertained facts, that the Pole may more easily be reached by what is known as the Spitzbergen route. They argue that to the east of this snow-crowned archipelago the influence of the Gulf Stream makes itself felt; and they conclude that this great warm current possibly strikes as far as the Pole itself. It is known that Parry, to the north of Spitzbergen, attained the latitude of 82° 45’; and it is recorded that a Hull whaler, the True-Love, in 1837, navigated an open sea in lat. 82° 30’ N., and long. 15° E.; so that she might probably have solved the problem and have gained the Pole, had she continued on her northerly course.

Holding this belief, the illustrious German geographer, Dr. Petermann, succeeded in raising funds for a German expedition in 1868; and the Germania, a brig of eighty tons, under the command of Captain Koldewey, sailed from Bergen on the 24th of May, for Shannon Island, in lat. 75° 14’ N., the furthest point on the Greenland coast reached by Sabine in 1823. She was accompanied by the Hansa, Captain Hegemann; and both ships were equipped in the most careful manner, and liberally supplied with appliances and stores.

On the 9th of July the expedition was off the island of Jan Mayen, and at midnight on that day was sailing direct to the northward. A heavy fog came on, and the two ships, even when sailing side by side, could not see one another, and communication could be maintained only by the use of the speaking-trumpet. Their crews might then conceive an idea of that impenetrable chaos which, according to Pythias, terminated the world beyond Thule, and which is neither air, nor earth, nor sea. It is impossible to imagine anything more melancholy than this gray, uniform, infinite veil or canopy; ocean itself, far as the eye can reach, is gray and gloomy.

For five successive days the weather remained in this condition, the fog alone varying in intensity, and growing thicker and thicker. On the 14th a calm prevailed, and the Germania lowered a boat to pick up drift-wood and hunt the sea-gulls. The ice-blink on the horizon showed that the ships were drawing near the great ice-fields of the Polar Ocean; and another sign of their proximity was the appearance of the ivory gull (Larus eburneus), which never wanders far from the ice. Occasionally the ships fell in with a rorqual, or nord-caper, as the seamen call it,—a species of whale distinguished by the presence of a dorsal fin.

On the morning of the 15th of July a light breeze blew up from the south, and the two ships sailed steadily on their north-western course through a sea covered with floating ice. An accustomed ear could already distinguish a distant murmur, which seemed to draw nearer and yet nearer; it was the swell of the sea breaking on the far-off ice-field. Nearer and yet nearer! Everybody gathered upon deck; and, suddenly, as if in virtue of some spell, the mists cleared away, and the adventurers saw before them, within a few hundred yards, the ice! It formed a long line, like a cliff-wall of broken and rugged rocks, whose azure-tinted precipices glittered in the sun, and repelled, unmoved, the rush of the foamy waves. The summit was covered with a deep layer of blinding snow.

They gazed on the splendid panorama in silence. It was a solemn moment, and in every mind new thoughts and new impressions were awakened, in which both hope and doubt were blended.

The point where the Germania had struck the ice was lat. 74° 47’ N. and long. 11° 50’ E., and the icy barrier stretched almost directly from north to south. The Hansa touched the ice on the same day, but in lat. 74° 57’ N., and long. 9° 41’ E.

The two ships, which had separated in the fog, effected a union on the 18th, and the Germania taking the Hansa in tow, they made towards Sabine Island. After awhile, the towing-rope was thrown off, the Germania finding it necessary to extinguish her fires and proceed under canvas. They then followed up, in a southerly direction, the great icy barrier, seeking for an opening which might afford them a chance of steering westward.

On the 20th, the Germania found the ice so thick in the south-west that she adopted a westerly Course, and hoisted a signal for the captain of the Hansa to come on board to a conference. The latter, however, misinterpreted it, and instead of reading the signal as “Come within hail,” read it as “Long stay a peak;” crowded on all sail, and speedily disappeared in the fog, which grew wonderfully intense before the Germania could follow her. Through this curious error the two ships were separated, and for fourteen months the crew of the Germania remained in ignorance of the fate of their comrades’.

Before following the Germania on her voyage of discovery, we propose to see what befell the Hansa among the Arctic ice.

Captain Hegemann had understood the signal of his senior officer to mean that the ships were to push on as far as possible to the westward, and, as we have seen, he crowded on all sail. But when the fog closed in, and he found himself out of sight of the Germania, he lay-to, in the hope that the latter might rejoin him. Disappointed in this, he kept on his way, and on the 28th of July sighted the rocky and gloomy coast of East Greenland, from Cape Bröer-Ruys to Cape James.

The weather continued fine. By the light of the midnight sun, which illuminated the fantastic outlines of the bergs, the adventurers engaged in a narwhal-hunt. Nothing is more extraordinary than the effect of the rays of the midnight sun penetrating into an ocean covered with floating ice. The warm and cold tones strike against each other in all directions; the sea is orange, leaden-gray, or dark green; the reefs of ice are tinged with a delicate rose-bloom; broad shadows spread over the snow, and the most varied effects of mirage are produced everywhere in the tranquil waters.

On the 9th of September, the Hansa found the channel of free water in which she had been navigating closed by a huge mass of ice, and to protect her against the drift of the floating bergs she was moored to it with stout hawsers. A few days later, the ice was broken up by a gale of wind from the north-east, and the hawsers snapped. The ice accumulating behind the ship raised it a foot and a half. On a contiguous sheet of ice, the explorers discovered a she-bear with her cub, and a boat was despatched in pursuit. The couple soon caught sight of it, and began to trot along the edge of the ice beside the boat, the mother grinding her teeth and licking her beard. Her enemies landed, and fired, and the bear fell in the snow, mortally wounded. While the cub was engaged in tenderly licking and caressing her, several attempts were made to capture it with a lasso; but it always contrived to extricate itself, and at last took to flight, crying and moaning bitterly. Though struck with a bullet, it succeeded in effecting its escape.

On the 12th they again saw a couple of bears coming from the east, and returning from the sea towards the land. The mother fell a victim to their guns, but the cub was captured, and chained to an anchor which they had driven into the ice. It appeared exceedingly restless and disturbed, but not the less did it greedily devour a slice of its mother’s flesh which the sailors threw to it. A snow wigwam was hastily constructed for its accommodation, and the floor covered with a layer of shavings; but the cub despised these luxuries of civilization, and preferred to encamp on the snow, like a true inhabitant of the Polar Regions. A few days afterwards it disappeared with its chain, which it had contrived to detach from the anchor; and the weight of the iron, in all probability, had dragged the poor beast to the bottom of the water.

The Hansa was now set fast in the ice, and no hope was entertained of her release until the coming of the spring. Her crew amused themselves with skating, and, when the weather permitted, with all kinds of gymnastic exercises. It became necessary, however, to consider what preparations should be made for encountering the Arctic winter, one of the bitterest enemies with which man is called upon to contend. The Hansa was strongly built, but her commander feared she might not be able to endure the more and more frequent pressure of the ice. At first, it was proposed to cover the boats with sail-cloth and convert them into winter-quarters; but it was felt that they would not afford a sufficient protection against the rigour of the Polar climate, its furious winds, its excess of cold, its wild whirlwinds of snow. And therefore it was resolved to erect on the ice-floe a suitable winter-hut, constructed of blocks of coal. Bricks made of this material have the double advantage of absorbing humidity, and reflecting the heat which they receive. Water and snow would serve for mortar; and a roof could be made with the covering which protected the deck of the Hansa from the snow.

The ground-plan of the house was designed by Captain Hegemann; it measured twenty feet in length, and fourteen feet in width; the ridge of the roof was eight feet and a half, and the side walls four feet eight inches in elevation. These walls were composed of a double row of bricks nine inches wide up to a height of two feet, after which a single row was used. They were cemented in a peculiarly novel fashion. The joints and fissures were filled up with dry snow, on which water was poured, and in ten minutes it hardened into a compact mass, from which it would have been exceedingly difficult to extract a solitary brick. The roof consisted of sails and mats, covered with a layer of snow. The door was two and a half feet wide, and the floor was paved with slabs of coal. Into this house, which was completed in seven days, provisions for two months were carried, including four hundred pounds of bread, two dozen boxes of preserved meat, a flitch of bacon, some coffee and brandy, besides a supply of firing-wood, and some tons of coal.

On the 8th of October, after the completion of the house, a violent snow-storm broke out, which would assuredly have rendered its construction impossible, and which, in five days, completely buried both the ship and the hut. Such immense piles of snow accumulated on the deck of the Hansa, that it was with the greatest difficulty the seamen could reach their berths.

From the 5th to the 14th of October the drift of the current was so strong, that the ice-bound ship was carried no fewer than seventy-two miles towards the south-south-east.

Meantime, the pressure of the ice continued to increase, and the Hansa seemed held in the tightening grasp of an invincible giant. Huge masses rose in front, and behind, and on both sides, and underneath, until she was raised seventeen feet higher than her original position. Affairs seemed so critical, that Captain Hegemann hastened to disembark the stores of clothing, the scientific instruments, charts, log-book, and diaries. It was found that through the constant strain on her timbers the ship had begun to leak badly, and on sounding, two feet of water were found in the pumps. All hands to work! But after half an hour’s vigorous exertions, the water continued to rise, slowly but surely; and the most careful search failed to indicate the locality of the leak. It was painfully evident that the good ship could not be saved.

“Though much affected,” says the chronicler of the expedition, “by this sad catastrophe, we endured it with firmness. Resignation was indispensable. The coal hut, constructed on the shifting ice-floe, was thenceforward our sole refuge in the long nights of an Arctic winter, and was destined, perhaps, to become our tomb.

“But we had not a minute to lose, and we set to work. At nine o’clock P.M. the snow-fall ceased; the sky glittered with stars, the moon illuminated with her radiance the immense wilderness of ice, and the rays of the Aurora Borealis here and there lighted up the firmament with their coloured coruscations. The frost was severe; during the night the thermometer sank to -20° R. One half the crew continued to work at the pumps; the other was actively engaged in disembarking on the ice the most necessary articles. There could be no thought of sleep, for in our frightful situation the mind was beset by the most conflicting apprehensions. What would become of us at the very outset of a season which threatened to be one of excessive rigour? In vain we endeavoured to imagine some means of saving ourselves. It was not possible to think seriously of an attempt to gain the land. Perhaps we might have succeeded, in the midst of the greatest dangers, in reaching the coast by opening up a way across the ice-floes, but we had no means of transporting thither our provisions; and it appeared, from the reports of Scoresby, that we could not count on finding any Eskimo establishments,—so that our only prospect then would have been to die of hunger.”

The sole resource remaining to the explorers was to drift to the south on their moving ice-floe, and confine themselves, meantime, to their coal hut. If their ice-raft proved of sufficient strength, they might hope to reach in the spring the Eskimo settlement in the south of Greenland, or come to gain the coast of Iceland by traversing its cincture of ice.

It was on the 22nd of October, in lat. 70° 50’ N., and long. 21° W., that the Hansa sank beneath the ice. Dr. Laube writes: “We made ourselves as snug as possible, and, once our little house was completely embanked with snow, we had not to complain of the cold. We enjoyed perfect health, and occupied the time with long walks and with our books, of which we had many. We made a Christmas-tree of birch-twigs, and embellished it with fragments of wax taper.”

To prevent attacks of disease, and to maintain the cheerfulness of the men, the officers of the expedition stimulated them to every kind of active employment, and laid down strict rules for the due division of the day.

At seven in the morning, they were aroused by the watch. They rose, attired themselves in their warm thick woollen clothing, washed in water procured by melting snow, and then took their morning cup of coffee, with a piece of hard bread. Various occupations succeeded: the construction of such useful utensils as proved to be necessary; stitching sail-cloth, mending clothes, writing up the day’s journal, and reading. When the weather permitted, astronomical observations and calculations were not forgotten. At noon, all hands were summoned to dinner, at which a good rich soup formed the principal dish; and as they had an abundance of preserved vegetables, the bill of fare was frequently changed. In the use of alcoholic liquors the most rigid economy was observed, and it was on Sunday only that each person received a glass of port.

The ice-floe on which their cabin stood was assiduously and carefully explored in all directions. It was about seven miles in circuit, and its average diameter measured nearly two miles.

The out-of-door amusements consisted chiefly of skating, and building up huge images of snow—Egyptian sphynxes and the like.

The borders of the ice-floe, especially to the west and south-west, presented a curious aspect; the attrition and pressure of the floating ice had built up about it high glittering walls, upwards of ten feet in elevation. The snow-crystals flashed and radiated in the sun like myriads of diamonds. The red gleam of morning and evening cast a strange emerald tint on the white surface of the landscape. The nights were magnificent. The glowing firmament, and the snow which reflected its lustre, produced so intense a brightness, that it was possible to read without fatigue the finest handwriting, and to distinguish remote objects. The phenomenon of the Aurora Borealis was of constant occurrence, and on one occasion was so wonderfully luminous that it paled the radiance of the stars, and everything upon the ice-floe cast a shadow, as if it had been the sun shining.

Near the coal-cabin stood two small huts, one of which served for ablutions, the other as a shed. Round this nucleus of the little shipwrecked colony were situated at convenient points the piles of wood for fuel, the boats, and the barrels of patent fuel and pork. To prevent the wind and snow from entering the dwelling-hut, a vestibule was constructed, with a winding entrance.

The greatest cold experienced was -29° 30’ F., and this was in December. After Christmas the little settlement was visited by several severe storms, and their ice-raft drifted close along the shore, sometimes within eight or nine miles, amidst much ice-crushing,—which so reduced it on all sides, that by the 4th of January 1870 it did not measure more than one-eighth of its original dimensions.

On the 6th of January, when they had descended as far south as 66° 45’ N. lat., the sun reappeared, and was joyfully welcomed.

On the night of the 15th of January, the colony was stricken by a sudden and terrible alarm. The ice yawned asunder, immediately beneath the hut, and its occupants had but just time to take refuge in their boats. Here they lay in a miserable condition, unable to clear out the snow, and sheltered very imperfectly from the driving, furious tempest. But on the 17th the gale moderated, and as soon as the weather permitted they set to work to reconstruct out of the ruins of the old hut a new but much smaller one. It was not large enough to accommodate more than half the colony; and the other half took up their residence in the boats.

February was calm and fine, and the floe still continued to drift southward along the land. The nights were gorgeous with auroral displays. Luminous sheaves expanded themselves on the deep blue firmament like the folds of a fan, or the petals of a flower.

March was very snowy, and mostly dull. On the 4th, the ice-raft passed within twenty-five miles of the glacier Kolberger-Heide. A day or two later, it nearly came into collision with a large grounded iceberg. The portion nearest to the drifting colony formed an immense overhanging mass; its principal body had been wrought by the action of the sun and the waves into the most capricious forms, and seemed an aggregate of rocks and pinnacles, towers and gateways. The castaways could have seized its projecting angles as they floated past. They thought their destruction certain, but the fragments of ice which surrounded the raft served as “buffers,” and saved it from a fatal collision.

On the 29th of March, they found themselves in the latitude of Nukarbik, the island where Graab, the explorer, wintered, from September 3rd, 1827, to April 5th, 1830. They had cherished the hope that from this spot they might be able to take to their boats, and start for Friedrichstal, a Moravian missionary station on the south coast of Greenland. However, the ice was as yet too compact for any such venture to be attempted.

For four weeks they were detained in the bay of Nukarbik, only two or three miles from the shore, and yet unable to reach it. Their raft was caught in a kind of eddy, and sometimes tacked to the south, sometimes to the north. The rising tide carried it towards the shore, the ebbing tide floated it out again to sea. During this detention they were visited by small troops of birds, snow linnets and snow buntings. The seamen threw them a small quantity of oats, which they greedily devoured. They were so tame that they allowed themselves to be caught by the hand.

From the end of March to the 17th of April, the voyagers continued their dreary vacillation between Skieldunge Island and Cape Moltke; a storm then drove them rapidly to the south. The coast, with its bold littoral mountain-chain, its deep bays, its inlets, its islands, and its romantic headlands, offered a succession of novel and impressive scenes; and specially imposing was the great glacier of Puisortok, a mighty ice-river which skirts the shore for upwards of thirty miles.

Early in May they had reached lat. 61° 12’.

On the 7th, some water-lanes opened for them a way to the shore; and abandoning the ice-raft, they took to their boats, with the intention of progressing southward along the coast. At first they met with considerable difficulty, being frequently compelled to haul up the boats on an ice-floe, and so pass the night, or wait until the wind was favourable. As this necessitated a continual unloading and reloading of the boats, the work was very severe. At one time they were detained for six days on the ice, owing to bad weather, violent gales, and heavy snow-showers. The temperature varied from +2° during the day to -5° R. during the night.

Their rations at this period were thus distributed:—In the morning, a cup of coffee, with a piece of dry bread. At noon, for dinner, soup and broth; in the evening, a few mouthfuls of cocoa, of course without milk and sugar.

They were compelled to observe the most rigid economy in the use of their provisions, lest, before reaching any settlement, they should be reduced to the extremities of famine. Yet their appetite was very keen; a circumstance easily explained, for they were necessarily very sparing in their allowance of meat and fat, which in the rigorous Arctic climate are indispensable as nourishment.

As no change took place in the position of the masses of ice which surrounded them, they resolved to drag their boats towards the island of Illiudlek, about three marine miles distant. They began this enterprise on the evening of the 20th, making use of some stout cables which they had manufactured during the winter, and harnessing themselves by means of a brace passed across the shoulders. That evening they accomplished three hundred paces. Snow fell heavily, and melted as fast as it fell, so that during their night-bivouac they suffered much from damp.

The next day they found before them such a labyrinth of blocks and fragments of ice, floating ice-fields, and water-channels, that they were constrained to give up the idea of hauling their boats across it, and resolved to wait for the spring tide—which, they knew, would occur in a few days. The delay was very wearisome. To beguile the time, some of the seamen set to work at wood-carving, while the officers and scientific gentlemen manufactured the pieces for a game of chess. Others prepared some fishing-lines, eighty fathoms long, in the hope of catching a desirable addition to their scanty bill of fare.

On the 24th, the weather was splendid. The sun shone in a cloudless sky, and wherever its genial radiance fell the thermometer marked + 28° 5’ R. This was an excellent opportunity for drying their clothes, which, as well as their linen, had been thoroughly soaked innumerable times. The coverings were removed from the boats, which, in the warm sunshine, exhaled great clouds of vapour. The cook endeavoured to add to his stores of provisions; but the seals churlishly refused to make their appearance, the fish disdained to nibble at the fat-baited hooks, and the stupid guillemots were cunning enough to escape the best directed shots.

M. Hildebrandt, with two seamen, made an attempt—in which they succeeded—to reach the island of Illiudlek, which lay about three miles off, and is from 450 to 500 feet in height. They found it a desert; not a trace of vegetation; its shores very steep, and at some points precipitous; its surface torn with crevasses and ravines. The only accessible part seemed on the north; but as the evening was drawing in, they had no time for exploration, and made haste to return to the boats.

The castaways now came to a resolution to seek a temporary refuge on this desolate isle. As the heat of the sun was sufficient to render their labour very painful, and they suffered much from the effects of the snow upon their eyes, they went to work at night, dragging their boats forward with many a weary effort, and rested during the daytime. In this way they reached the island on the 4th of June.

Here they moored their boats in a small bay sheltered by a wall of rocks from the north wind, which they named Hansa-Hafen. Next day they shot two-and-twenty divers, which provided them with a couple of good dinners. The supply was very valuable, as the stock of provisions on hand would not last above a fortnight.

After a brief rest, the adventurers resumed their voyage, keeping close in-shore, and struggling perseveringly amidst ice and stones—and further checked by an inaccurate chart, which led them into a deep fiord, instead of King Christian IV. Sound. On the 13th of June, however, they arrived at the Moravian missionary station of Friedrichstal, where their countrymen received them with a hearty welcome. For two hundred days they had sojourned upon a drifting ice-field, experiencing all the hardships of an Arctic winter, aggravated by an insufficiency of food.

They reached Julianshaab on the 21st of June; embarked on board the Danish brig Constance; and were landed at Copenhagen on the 1st of September.

We must now return to the Germania.

Captain Koldewey made several bold attempts to penetrate the pack-ice, but proved unsuccessful in all until, on the 1st of August, he reached lat. 74°, where he contrived to effect a passage; and though much delayed by a succession of fogs and calms, he made his way to Sabine Island,—and dropped anchor on its southern side, in lat. 74° 30’ N., and long. 29° W., on the 5th of August.

On the 10th he again passed towards the north, keeping along the Greenland shore until, in lat. 75° 31’ N., his advance was checked by a mass of closely-packed ice, which stretched from the coast of the mainland out to Shannon Island, a long unbroken line of fourteen miles. It presented a very formidable appearance, being edged in some places with a fringe of broken ice, boulders, and blocks, rising in heaps and hummocks forty feet high.

The Germania remained in this position for several days. As nothing but ice was visible to the northward, and no prospect opened up of further progress in that direction, Captain Koldewey moved his ship to the south side of the island on the 16th of August, and dropped anchor close to Cape Philip Broke.

Eleven days were spent in a careful exploration of Shannon Island, during which time a musk-ox was shot, and close watch was kept from an elevated point on the ice lying to the northward. But as it continued solid and immovable, and the end of the season was at hand, Captain Koldewey returned northward, and brought his vessel to anchor on the south side of Pendulum Island on the 27th of August.

When it became necessary to make preparations for facing the coming winter, Captain Koldewey moved his ship on the 13th of September into the little harbour he had occupied on the 5th of August. Their subsequent experience showed it to be the only secure one between the parallels of 74° and 77°. A few days later the ship was frozen in.

The first sledging-party was despatched on the 14th of September, and remained out for eight days. After reaching the mainland, they travelled for four days up a newly-discovered fiord, finding many petrifactions and much lignite. They also saw large herds of musk-oxen. Vegetation was abundant, but chiefly composed of species of Andromeda. In the course of this excursion, our explorers had one or two adventures with bears. First, a female, with her two cubs, paid them a visit, but being received with some volleys of musketry, quickly beat a retreat. On another occasion, a daring intruder found his way into their tent. His temerity, however, cost him his life; and the Germans banqueted gaily on the fat and flesh with which he incontinently supplied them.