On clear days the depôt at Cape Joseph Henry was visible with a good glass from the top of Cairn Hill. As long as it could be seen we knew that the party had not reached it, and a most anxious watch was kept on the little flickering miraged spot. Up to the 18th June no change occurred, and then Lieutenant May and his indefatigable dogs went off to try and find some trace of the missing party. On the 25th the suspense came to an end. It was Sunday morning, and shortly after service the news came from Cairn Hill that both Aldrich’s sledge and the dog-sledge were in sight. The two tents pitched on the floes near Mushroom Point could be made out plainly. They were evidently encamped for the day as usual. Their homeward march would not begin till evening, so at 7 p.m. everyone that could left the ship to meet them. Rounding a low point, we came on them suddenly. The “Challenger” led the way with colours flying and sledge-sail set. Her officer and the last man left of his crew—a stalwart, light-hearted teetotaler—hauled in her drag-belts. One man, unable to walk, lay muffled on the sledge, the others kept up as best they could, taking turns on the dog-sledge. They had turned back from a point two hundred and thirty geographical miles to the westward, and had travelled, there and back, over seven hundred miles of coast-line, but had found no shore leading poleward. On their outward journey, as they passed each successive cape, another and another came into view, till, on rounding a headland in north latitude 83°.7, they found the shore-line bending off to the southward. At this spot, since called Cape Columbia, a slaty cliff sloping downward to the floes formed the most northern point of the new world. For miles on either side the shore was lifeless, but there on the slope of the cape, amongst the stones and snow, they found a little Arctic poppy, with its tiny yellow petals withered into lines and folds of green. Beyond Cape Columbia it was sometimes hard to tell where the land ended and the frozen sea began; here and there, banks of sand and gravel were bare of snow, but when you dug into them with a pick there was deep ice beneath. On the left lay a monotonous, snow-clad shore rising into irregular mountain groups, and on the right, perennial floes, worn into mounds and valleys. They still followed the shore-line, till, on their forty-fifth day’s journey, they found themselves further south than the winter quarters of the ship. Then they came to the limit of their provisions. There was only enough left to carry them back to their farthest depôt. And so, recovering in succession each of the little piles of stores deposited on their outward journey, they retraced their footsteps along this shore that no other human eyes than theirs had ever looked on. For a week before the dog-sledge met them their state was even worse than we had feared. The snow that bore them on their outward way had softened; every step sank a different depth in it, sometimes