When they set out, it was arranged that a relief party should meet them at Bell Island the third week in April, but so many delays had been caused that they were not able to reach the rendezvous until a fortnight after the time fixed. The relief party had been waiting for them, considerably anxious at their non-appearance. In the two months they had been travelling, they had had only thirteen and a half fine days. After returning to Elmwood and resting for ten days, the two again set out to the eastward. They were travelling over the ice, on the second day out, when it gave way under the sledge. They lost all their stores and equipment, and saturated their cartridges. They had at once to turn back, but the ice was growing so thin that they had great difficulty in reaching the shore. For nearly twenty-six hours they had to keep marching before they covered the forty-two miles which lay between the scene of their disaster and Elmwood. This was the last journey undertaken prior to their departure in the _Windward_ for England a month or so later. The account of the achievements of this expedition would be incomplete were no mention made of two open-water discoveries. One was that of the British Channel, an open-water tract extending from the islands into an open sea, which formed the second discovery, and was named Queen Victoria Sea in honour of the then reigning sovereign. This sea was observed to be free from ice all the time the expedition was on the islands, and the information thus obtained was of considerable service to the Italian explorers who, a few years later, made an ineffectual dash to reach the Pole over the ice-fields. Further valuable information was obtained by geological observations of the islands. These demonstrated that the islands were an archipelago, formed from the remains of a fairly extensive tableland, the surface of which was composed of basalt so similar in character as to be almost identical with the basalts of the north of Scotland. To the scientific mind this suggests that at one time these far-outlying islands were connected with lands from which they are now separated by enormous stretches of sea, and were subject, in that distant period, to the same volcanic outbursts and covered by the same basaltic flows that resulted. It must have been a period of enormous volcanic activity, for the beds of basalt overlying the fossil-bearing strata averaged six hundred feet in thickness, while evidence of successive flows is found in the existence of sedimentary fossil-bearing rocks sandwiched between layers of basalt.