The death of Hall left the expedition without a head. However, Captain Buddington, the sailing-master, and Dr. Bessels, the chief of the scientific staff, signed an agreement to do all in their power to fulfil the ultimate object of Hall's ambition. Desultory efforts to go northward by boat were made without success the following year, and the only expedition which had definite result was one on foot by Sergeant Meyer, of the Signal Corps of the United States Army, during which he reached Repulse Harbor, 82° 9´ N., on the shores of the frozen Polar Sea, at that time the most northerly land ever attained. The future of the Polaris expedition does not strictly pertain to Hall. However, the winter was marked by a series of valuable physical observations, made by Dr. Bessels and Mr. Bryan, the astronomer. In August, 1872, it was decided to return to the United States. Pushed into an impenetrable pack, anchored to a floe, the Polaris drifted with the main ice-pack down Kennedy Channel, through Kane Sea, and into Smith Sound, where, on October 15, 1872, off Northumberland Island, the pack was disrupted by a violent gale, which freed the Polaris. Part of her crew, left upon the ice-pack, experienced the horrors of a mid-winter drift southward of thirteen hundred miles, and were picked up off the coast of Labrador by the sealer Tigress, in the spring of 1872. The Polaris drifted to land in Lifeboat Cove, near Littleton Island, where the party built winter-quarters on shore, known as Polaris House. In the succeeding summer they built boats from the remains of their ship, by means of which they reached Cape York, where their contemplated journey across Melville Bay was rendered unnecessary by falling in with the whaler Ravenscraig, which took them to England. [Illustration: Esquimau Woman. Sketched from life.] The geographical results of Hall's last expedition were extensive and valuable. Not only was the Polaris navigated to the highest point then ever attained by a vessel, but the very shores of the Polar Sea were visited and explored. Hall carried northward and completed the exploration of Kennedy Channel; outlined the coast of Hall Basin and Robinson Channel; extended Grinnell Land northward nearly two degrees of latitude to practically its extreme limit; added materially to the northern limits of Greenland, and charted a very extensive portion of its northern coast. Unfortunately for the general credit of the expedition, the accurate observations and conservative estimates of Hall were not adhered to, and in their stead were published, under government auspices, a chart of Hall's discoveries which proved misleading in many of its details, extravagant and unreliable in its claims of new northern lands.