By the 25th of May we were prepared for another and final attempt to accomplish our mission, and to try our fortunes in the ice. We were certainly sobered down considerably by our late severe lesson; but although less confident in our own powers, a steady determination to do our best prevailed throughout the ship. Passing again through the Waigat, we stopped at the coal-deposits to fill up with fuel, and we shot a few ptarmigan while thus detained. We next stopped at Saunderson’s Hope, “the Cape where the fowls do breed,” but it was yet too early for eggs, and as the looms had no young to protect, they flew away in thousands at every discharge of a gun; we got but few of these, in our opinion, delicious birds. On the 31st, we made fast to an iceberg off Upernavik, to await the breaking up of the ice in Melville Bay. When we were in these latitudes the previous year, all things living were migrating southward, but now constant flights of sea-birds streamed northward, night and day, towards their breeding-places and feeding-grounds, and by sitting on the rocky points, and shooting them as they passed, we could generally make a fair bag. We were now almost subsisting on eider ducks and looms. On June the 6th, we commenced our ice-struggles in Melville Bay, endeavouring, according to the usual mode of navigation, to push up, between the main pack and the ice still attached to the land, on all occasions when the winds moved the pack out, and left a space or lane of water. While thus following up the coast, on the 7th, we ran upon a reef of sunken and unknown rocks, and, on the tide falling, we lay over in such a manner as to threaten to fill upon the water again rising. We succeeded, however, in heaving off without damage. After many escapes from being squeezed by the ice closing upon the land, and after three weeks of intense labour, we reached Cape York on June 26th. We there communicated with the natives who had so much assisted Dr. Kane, when he wintered in Smith Sound. These poor creatures live upon the flesh of the bear, seal, and walrus, which they kill upon the ice with bone spears. They are, perhaps, the only people in the world living upon a sea-coast without boats of any kind, and are so completely isolated, that, previous to their being first visited in 1818, they considered themselves to be the only people in the world. Dr. Kane left among them a Greenland Esquimaux, “Hans,” with his canoe. They told us that Hans was married, and was well, but that they had eaten the boat, besides many of their dogs, when hungry, during the last winter. We invited them on board, and they saw all our treasures of wood and iron; but they appeared to covet more than all, our dogs, and a few light pieces of wood, fit for spear-handles. We sent them away rejoicing over a few presents of long knives and needles, and they continued to dance and brandish the knives over their heads until we were out of sight.