When Melville Bay was reached, Hayes was delighted to find open water with only an iceberg here and there. This was crossed in the short space of fifty-five hours. Near the northern part of the bay a loose pack about 15 miles wide was encountered, but under a full pressure of canvas, little difficulty was experienced in “boring” it. Standing close in under Cape York, Hayes kept a careful look-out for natives. He wished if possible to ascertain whether Hans of the Kane expedition was there. In this he was successful. Hayes writes:— “Six years’ experience among the wild men of this barren coast had brought him to their level of filthy ugliness. His companions were his wife, who carried her first-born in a hood upon her back; her brother, a bright-eyed boy of twelve years, and ‘an ancient dame with voluble and flippant tongue,’ her mother. They were all dressed in skins, and, being the first Esquimaux we had seen whose habits remained wholly uninfluenced by contact with civilisation, they were, naturally, objects of much interest to us all. “Hans led us up the hillside, over rough rocks and through deep snow-drifts, to his tent. It was pitched about 200 feet above the level of the sea, in a most inconvenient position for a hunter; but it was his ‘look-out.’ Wearily he had watched, year after year, for the hoped-for vessel; but summer after summer passed and the vessel came not, and he still sighed for his southern home and the friends of his youth. “His tent was a sorry habitation. It was made after the Esquimaux-fashion, of seal-skins, and was barely large enough to hold the little family who were grouped about us. “I asked Hans if he would go with us. “‘Yes!’ “Would he take his wife and baby? “‘Yes!’ “Would he go without them? “‘Yes!’ “Having no leisure to examine critically into the state of his mind, and having an impression that the permanent separation of husband and wife is regarded as a painful event, I gave the Esquimaux mother the benefit of this conventional suspicion, and brought them both aboard, with their baby and their tent and all their household goods. The old woman and bright-eyed boy cried to be taken along; but I had no further room, and we had to leave them to the care of the remainder of the tribe, who, about twenty in number, had discovered the vessel, and came shouting gleefully over the hill. After distributing to them some useful presents, we pushed off for the schooner. “Hans was the only unconcerned person in the party. I subsequently thought that he would have been quite as well pleased had I left his wife and child to the protection of their savage kin; and had I known him as well then as, with good reason, I knew him afterwards, I would not have gone out of my way to disturb his barbarous existence.”