To reach this point they had been travelling north-westwards for six days, the way due north being impassable; but on turning south they seemed to enter another country; so much did the going improve after the first mile that in three days they covered over forty miles. They were making for Petermann Land, which does not exist, or for the wide-stretching Franz Josef Land, also placed on the maps by Payer, which Jackson had been cutting up into fragments while the _Fram_ was in the ice. Further south difficulties thickened ahead of them till the road became almost as bad as that to the north. Before they reached land the hundred days they had allowed themselves had increased to more than half as many again, their dogs had been killed one by one to yield food for the rest, until only two remained; Nansen was helpless with rheumatism for two days; and Johansen was nearly killed by a bear. Through a chain of disasters caused by storms and fogs and snow and the state of the ice, they threaded their way, sometimes by sledge, sometimes by kayak, through mazes of open channels, leaping from floe to floe and ferrying back to get their baggage over, hundreds of yards on mere brash, dragging the sledges after them in constant fear of their capsizing into the water. Then the ice gave out and, taking to their kayaks, they sailed and paddled to what is now known as Frederick Jackson Island in the north of the Franz Josef Archipelago. Here they wintered, quite at a loss at first to know where they were, owing to their watches having run down during a great effort of thirty-six hours at a stretch, so that they did not know their longitude, though they subsequently concluded they must be somewhere on Franz Josef Land within 140 miles of Eira Harbour. They built a hut and altogether lived passably well, there being no lack of food, thanks mainly to the bears, whose visits were embarrassing in their frequency though the visitors were not unwelcome when they came to stay.