The autumnal journeys of 1853 had led to nothing promising in the neighborhood of the _Advance_, so throughout the winter he was busy in preparing for the spring sledge trips in order to search the northern coast line for the lost explorers. Thus planning and laboring he definitely recognizes the unfavorable situation. "The death of my dogs, fifty-seven in all, the rugged obstacles of the ice, and the intense cold (the temperature had fallen to one hundred degrees below the freezing-point) have obliged me to reorganize our whole equipment. We have had to discard all our India-rubber fancy-work. Canvas shoemaking, fur-socking, sewing, carpentering are all going on. Pemmican cases are thawing, buffalo robes drying, camp equipments are in the corners." He adds: "The scurvy spots that mottled our faces made it plain that we were all unfit for arduous travel on foot at the intense temperatures of the nominal spring. _But I felt that our work was unfinished._" [Illustration: Smith Sound and West Greenland.] The very start of the party, on March 19, 1854, indicated clearly that two errors, frequent in arctic work, had been committed--overloading and too early a start in periods of extreme cold. Kane had himself noticed that in extreme cold, say fifty degrees below freezing, "the ice or snow covering offers great resistance to the sledge-runners. The dry snow in its finely divided state resembles sand, and the runners creak as they pass over it." In a temperature of seventy-one degrees below freezing "we packed the sledge and strapped on the boat to see how she would drag. Eight men were scarcely able to move her.... Difficulties of draught must not interfere with my parties." Erroneously attributing the trouble to the thin runners of his Eskimo sledge, he changed it for one with broad-gauged sledge-runners, and then added two hundred pounds of pemmican to the load. The party started to the north in a temperature of seventy-five degrees below freezing, and even with extra men in the rue-raddies (canvas shoulder-belts for dragging the sledge) they were barely able to move the sledge forward over the smooth, level floes near the brig. When the sledgemen came to rough ice they promptly dumped both boat and pemmican, realizing the impossibility of hauling them. Soon they came to high, uptilted ice-hummocks, separated by precipitous ice-chasms filled with drifting snow. It then became necessary to divide the load and so travel three times over the same road.