For five nights the men slept in the boats; the days were employed in raising their settlement from its ruins. A wooden kitchen was built and a dwelling house, exactly like the one destroyed, but half as large (14 feet long by 10 broad and 1½ high in the middle). In spite of such frightful experiences, the men kept cheerful, undaunted, and exalted; in fact, the cook kept a right seaman-like humour, having exclaimed while repairing the coffee kettle, during the frightful pressure of the ice which destroyed the floe, “if the floe would only hold together until he had finished his kettle! he wished so to make the evening tea in it, so that, before our departure, we might have something warm.” February and March found them helplessly drifting to the southward, and by Easter (17th of April) they lay floating backwards and forwards in the Bay of Unbarbik. Linnets and snow-buntings soon made their appearance, so fearless and confiding that, “Some of them,” so says Bade’s day-book, “will almost perch upon our noses, and in five minutes allowed themselves to be caught three times.” On the 7th of May the agreeable sight of open water in the direction of land cheered both officers and men. The captain now decided that an attempt would be made to leave the floe and reach the coast. The little community, divided amid three boats, bade farewell to the ice-floe which had been their home for two hundred days. During several days of bad weather, small progress was made. The men suffered considerably from exhaustion, snow-blindness, and want of proper shelter and food—the latter problem was occasioning considerable concern, and already the men were “almost looking their eyes out after a seal.” There was but six weeks’ short provisions on hand and a long distance to travel over a barren and uninhabited coast before the settlement could be reached. The ice remaining unnavigable, it was decided to make the island of Illuidlek, dragging the heavy boat-loads over the all but impassable ice hummocks. By the 24th of May, Mr. Hildebrandt and the sailors Philipp and Paul, set foot on firm ground. Their encouraging report cheered the others to similar exertions, but the progress was slow and exhausting. Not until the 4th of June were the entire party landed at Illuidlek. The island proved of rocky formation, naked, and bare of vegetation. “Everywhere we find nothing,” writes one of the party, “but bare barren cliffs, the higher the wilder, sparingly clothed with moss and stunted willows. But no trace of human inhabitants.”