It may here be added that in 1875 Captain Young attempted to follow the route opened up by Franklin and to reach Behring Strait via Peel and Franklin Straits; an impenetrable ice-barrier in Peel Strait, however, compelled him to turn back. In 1878-79, Lieutenant F. Schwatka, of the United States Army, and Mr W. H. Gilder, in the course of a brilliant journey, thoroughly explored the route over which the men of the _Erebus_ and _Terror_ were supposed to have travelled on their way to the Great Fish River, but, though they found many relics of the expedition, they could not discover a single paper or document of any kind. CHAPTER XIX THE VOYAGES OF KANE AND HAYES Up to the middle of the nineteenth century America had not played a very important part in the history of Arctic exploration. In 1853, however, an expedition set out under the command of Dr Elisha Kent Kane—the young doctor who accompanied Lieutenant De Haven in the _Advance_ and _Rescue_—which won immortality for itself by penetrating Smith Sound to a point never reached by any previous explorer. Although Kane had special instructions from the Secretary of the United States Navy to “conduct an expedition to the Arctic seas in search of Sir John Franklin,” it is really hardly possible to regard his enterprise as a serious part of the Franklin search, for it concerned itself with a region in which there was no possibility of finding any traces of the missing explorers. The ship chosen for the expedition was our old friend the _Advance_, and the expenses were shared by Mr Grinnell, Mr Peabody, and a number of American scientific institutions. The crew consisted of seventeen officers and men, among them being Brooks and Morton, both of whom had served under De Haven, and Isaac Israel Hayes, a young surgeon, who was destined to conduct an expedition on his own account later on. The equipment of the ship seems to have been carried out with but little regard to the laws of hygiene, as recognised by Arctic explorers. “We took with us,” says Kane, “some 2000 lbs. of pemmican, a parcel of Borden’s meat biscuit, some packages of exsiccated potato, some pickled cabbage, and a liberal quantity of American dried fruits and vegetables. Besides these we had the salt beef and pork of the navy ration, hard biscuit and flour.... I hoped to obtain some fresh provisions in addition before reaching the upper coast of Greenland.” Such a dietary as this made it almost inevitable that scurvy would break out, and, as will be seen later on, the crew suffered terribly from the ravages of this fearful disease.