Hayes did his best to disparage both Kalutunah and Hans, to whom he was not quite so much indebted as Kane, owing to his having given himself a better chance of retreat by not taking the schooner out of Smith Sound, his quarters in Hartstene Bay being only some twelve miles north of Cape Alexander. He had come to verify the existence of the open sea and sail to the Pole across it if he could; and he verified it to his own satisfaction. But he did not get so far north as Morton, although he claimed to have done so, for he climbed a cliff eight hundred feet high and looked out over the open water—in Kennedy Channel—and did not see the Greenland cliffs trending away northwards within thirty miles of him, and visible all the way up for two degrees north of Cape Constitution. Thus he left the map as Kane left it, with Greenland cut off short south of the eighty-first parallel, and his farthest seems to have been the south point of Rawlings Bay, where the _Alert_ was forced on shore in August, 1876, in 80° 15´. "I climbed," he says, "the steep hillside to the top of a ragged cliff, which I supposed to be about eight hundred feet above the level of the sea. The view which I had from this elevation furnished a solution of the cause of my progress being arrested on the previous day. The ice was everywhere in the same condition as in the mouth of the bay across which I had endeavoured to pass. A broad crack, starting from the middle of the bay, stretched over the sea, and uniting with other cracks as it meandered to the eastward, it expanded as the delta of some mighty river discharging into the ocean, and under a water-sky, which hung upon the northern horizon, it was lost in the open sea. The sea beneath me was a mottled sheet of white and dark patches, these latter being either soft decaying ice or places where the ice had wholly disappeared. These spots were heightened in intensity of shade and multiplied in size as they receded, until the belt of the water-sky blended them all together into one uniform colour of dark blue. The old and solid floes (some a quarter of a mile, and others miles across) and the massive ridges and wastes of hummocked ice which lay piled between them and around their margins, were the only parts of the sea which retained the whiteness and solidity of winter."