Next year he visited the large glacier in Whale Sound which he named after Professor John Tyndall, pulling first along its front in a boat and then mounting its surface. As he rowed along within a few fathoms of this two miles of ice, he found the face "worn and wasted away until it seemed like the front of some vast incongruous temple, here a groined roof of some huge cathedral, and there a pointed window or a Norman doorway deeply moulded; while on all sides were pillars round and fluted and pendants dripping crystal drops of the purest water, and all bathed in a soft blue atmosphere. Above these wondrous archways and galleries there was still preserved the same Gothic character; tall spires and pinnacles rose along the entire front and multiplied behind them, and new forms met the eye continually. Strange, there was nothing cold or forbidding anywhere. The ice seemed to take the warmth which suffused the air, and I longed to pull my boat far within the opening and paddle beneath the Gothic archways." Charles Francis Hall, of Cincinnati, was a man of a very different stamp. He was a genius and a genuine worker, an accurate observer and painstaking explorer who believed above all things in thoroughness. Realising that the best way to study the Polar regions was to understand the Eskimos, who know most about them, and utilise their local knowledge, he settled amongst them, lived with them, adopted their customs, and became as one of them in their huts and tents, taking part in their sports and hardships. Two friends he made amongst them, Ebierbing and his wife Tookoolito, better known as Joe and Hannah, who accompanied him till he died. [Illustration: TYNDALL GLACIER] After clearing up the Frobisher problem and throwing some light on the Franklin mystery, he started in 1871 to go as far north as he could across the reported Polar Sea. To him Henry Grinnell, who did so much for northern discovery, entrusted the American flag which had been to the Antarctic with Wilkes in 1838, to the Arctic with De Haven, with Kane and with Hayes, and was a sort of oriflamme of Polar discovery. His ship was the _Polaris_, of 387 tons, once the _Periwinkle_, a name which seemed to be a little too unassuming. Buddington, his sailing-master, was an experienced whaling captain; his assistant, Tyson, destined for the independent command of an ice-floe, was another whale-fisher. The naturalist was Emil Bessels. On board were also Joe and Hannah—of course—and William Morton, to show where the sea was, and, picked up at Upernivik, the indispensable Hans Hendrik with his wife and three children.