halted for rest the boats were placed alongside each other, with their sterns to the wind, the snow or wet cleared out of them, and the sails, held up by the bamboo masts and three paddles, were placed over them as awnings with the entrance at the bow. Progress was not great, sometimes fifty yards an hour, occasionally twelve miles a day, that is on the ice, for soon it was apparent that the distance gained by reckoning was greater than that given by observation, and Parry realised to his dismay that the pack was drifting south while he was going north. But he kept on till on the 21st of July he reached 82° 45´, which remained the farthest north for forty-nine years. [Illustration: PARRY'S BOATS AMONG THE HUMMOCKS] During the last few days he had been drifting south in the day almost as far as he had advanced north in the night, and, having used up half his provisions, he reluctantly abandoned the struggle as hopeless. "As we travelled," he says, "by far the greater part of our distance on the ice, three, and not infrequently, five times over, we may safely multiply the road by 2½; so that our whole distance, on a very moderate calculation, amounted to five hundred and eighty geographical miles, or six hundred and sixty-eight statute miles; being nearly sufficient to have reached the Pole in a direct line." In 1858 a Swedish expedition under Otto Torell started from Hammerfest for Spitsbergen. He was accompanied by A. Quennerstedt and Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld. They explored Horn Sound, Bell Sound, and Green Harbour. In Bell Sound they dredged with great success for mollusca; they made a botanical collection, chiefly of mosses and lichens, found tertiary plant fossils, and, in the North Harbour, carboniferous limestone beds with the tertiary plant-bearing strata above them—in short, Nordenskiöld entered upon his long and fruitful study of Spitsbergen geology. Three years afterwards Torell took out another expedition, Nordenskiöld going with him, which was to explore the northern coast and then make for the far north; but the ice conditions kept them in Treurenberg Bay, where they visited Hecla Cove and found Parry's flagstaff. In the course of their journeys they noticed in Cross Bay the first known Spitsbergen fern, _Cystopteris fragilis_; by the side of a freshwater lake in Wijde Bay an Alpine char was picked up; and, at Shoal Point, Torell discovered in a mass of driftwood a specimen of the unmistakable Entada bean, two and a quarter inches across, brought there from the West Indies by the Gulf Stream, as other specimens have been drifted to European shores.