The voyage was fortunate so long as Hall lived. The _Polaris_ found the Polar gates open before her. She steamed right up Smith Sound, through Kane Sea, up Kennedy Channel, into Robeson Channel—named after the Secretary to the American Navy—until she reached the ice, in 82° 16´, on the 30th of August, 1871, the highest latitude then attained by a ship. Hall would have pressed on into the ice, but Buddington wisely refused, and hardly had the _Polaris_ been headed round when she was beset and carried southwards, to escape in a few days and take refuge for the winter in a harbour on the east of what is now known as Hall Basin, protected at its entrance by a grounded floeberg. The latitude is 81° 38´, the harbour Hall called Thank God Bay. There in November he died; and close by is Hall's Rest, where he is buried. His death was the end of the enterprise. Buddington wished to return as soon as the ship was released, and eventually had his way, after a journey or two of little importance. But he stayed too long. The ship was clear in June, and he did not start until the 1st of August, and he started by driving her into the pack, anchored her to a floe, and drifted helplessly into Baffin Bay, as De Haven had done through Lancaster Sound in 1850. For eleven weeks the drift continued until she was off Northumberland Island on the 15th of October. Here in the middle of the night a violent gale arose, and the crippled ship, nipped between two masses of ice, was lifted bodily and thrown on her side, her timbers cracking loudly and her sides apparently breaking in. Two boats, all she had, were hurriedly got on to the ice, and provisions, stores, and clothing were being passed out, when with a roar the floe broke asunder, and the _Polaris_ disappeared like a phantom in the gale. As the ice cracked and the sides lurched apart, a bundle of fur lay across the fissure. A grab was made at it, and the bundle was saved. It contained the baby of Joe the Eskimo, whose wife had been confined the year before in latitude 82°, perhaps the most northerly birthplace of any of this world's inhabitants. [Illustration: A SEAL IN DANGER] On the ice were Tyson, with Sergeant Meyer, the steward, the cook, six sailors, and nine Eskimos, men, women, and children, including Hans and Joe. They built a house, from the materials thrown out from the ship, as a shelter; and they built snow houses as the time went on and the floe diminished. Provisions they had but few, but Hans and Joe were indefatigable. They speared seals, caught fish, trapped birds, and, sometimes, a bear would scramble up on to the ice for them to shoot—and they never missed. In short, without them the party would have starved to death.