The floe on which the castaways passed the winter was about a hundred yards long and seventy-five broad. On this they voyaged down the whole length of Baffin Bay and through Davis Strait, the ice melting away and getting smaller and smaller as they drifted south, until on the 1st of April, when it was only twenty yards round, they had to take to the remaining boat, the other having been used for fuel. Once they nearly touched the shore, but the wind rose and off they were driven in the snow. When they were picked up by the sealer _Tigress_ in 53° 35´, near the coast of Labrador, on the 30th of April, they had drifted fifteen hundred miles in the hundred and ninety-six days that had elapsed since they left the ship. The _Polaris_, blown to the northward, reached land at Lifeboat Cove in the entrance to Smith Sound, a little north of Foulke Harbour, and here with the aid of the Etah Eskimos the crew passed the winter; and, in the spring, some of them went on an expedition in the Hayes country and lost the famous flag. As the ship could not be made seaworthy, two flat-bottomed boats were built of her materials, and on the 21st of June these were found hauled up on a floe in Melville Bay, and their people rescued by the whaler _Ravenscraig_, which shifted them into the _Arctic_, another Dundee whaler, on board of which was Commander Markham, who, with Hans Hendrik, four years afterwards, was to follow up Hall's track to the north. The results of this expedition were of considerable importance. In five days Captain Hall had run five hundred miles through what on most occasions has been found to be an ice-choked sea. He completed the exploration of Kennedy Channel, discovered Hall Basin and Robeson Channel, and was the first to reach the Polar ocean by this route. Greenland and Grinnell Land he extended northward for nearly a hundred and forty miles; and, north of Petermann Fiord, where he showed that the inland ice terminated, he had found a large area free from ice, with its wild flowers and herbage and musk oxen. Hall's remarkable success in taking a ship to so high a latitude led to the Government expedition of 1875, the first British attempt to reach the Pole since Parry's failure in 1827. Three ships were employed: the _Alert_, a seventeen-gun sloop; the _Discovery_, once the _Bloodhound_, a Dundee whaler; and the _Valorous_. The _Alert_ and _Discovery_ were specially prepared for the voyage at Portsmouth by Sir Leopold M'Clintock who was then Admiral Superintendent of the dockyard; the _Valorous_, an old paddle sloop, required little alteration, as her duty was merely to carry the stores that could not safely be taken by the exploring vessels in crossing the Atlantic and hand them over at Disco. [Illustration: SIR GEORGE NARES]