After this preliminary journey Hayes laid down supplies at the nearest point on the Greenland shore south of, and facing, Cape Hawks. This place, called Cairn Point, was to be the base of his summer's campaign to the north. Finally everything was ready for the main journey, and the party started on the night of April 3, 1861. Twelve men, the entire available force, were put into the field: Jansen with an eight-dog sledge, Knorr with a six-dog sledge, and a ten-man sledge on which was mounted a twenty-foot metallic life-boat, with which Hayes hoped to navigate the Polar Sea. The journey lay directly to the north over the frozen surface of Kane Sea, where the difficulties of travel through the broken hummocky ice were so great, and the unfitness of some of the men for Arctic travel so speedily developed, that Hayes was forced to abandon his efforts to get the boat across the frozen sea, which, he says, "could not have been done by one hundred men." On April 24th Hayes records that he had been twenty-two days from the schooner, and was now distant only thirty miles from Cairn Point. Four days later, still struggling across the rough ice of Kane Sea, the party was practically broken down, being, as Hayes chronicles, "barely capable of attending to their own immediate necessities without harboring the thought of exerting themselves to complete a journey to which they can see no termination, and in the very outset of which they feel that their lives are being sacrificed." In this critical condition Hayes changed his plans, and sent back the entire party to the brig, except Knorr, Jansen, and McDonald, whom he selected as best fitted to make the northern journey, which he had decided to make with fourteen dogs and two sledges. Turning northward with renewed confidence and vigor, though yet struggling with various misfortunes through a tangle of broken hummocks, Hayes reached Cape Hawks on May 11th. The condition of the ice may be judged from the fact that he had been thirty-one days in making a distance of eighty miles, a little more than two miles a day. Three days' farther march took him to Cape Frazier, where the flagstaff erected by him in 1853 yet stood erect. At the end of the next march, where they were driven to the sea ice owing to the impossibility of following the ice-foot, Hayes ascended the hillside, whence, he says, "No land was visible to the eastward. As it would not have been difficult through such an atmosphere to see a distance of fifty or sixty miles, it would appear therefore that Kennedy Channel is somewhat wider than heretofore supposed."