At the dead of night, in the face of a fierce gale, a part of the ship's company and stores were transferred to the ice. Then the heaving billows broke the vessel loose from the floe, separating the men on the ice from those on the vessel. With eighteen companions Captain Tyson lived on the ice-floe which moved southward, breaking off piece after piece, for a period of six and one-half months, suffering incredible hardships from cold, hunger, and constant fear. Finally, they were sighted off the Labrador coast by the ship _Tigress_ and rescued in a starving condition. The story of this ice-floe journey of one thousand three hundred miles is one of the most thrilling in maritime annals. Fortunately, there were two Eskimos on the ice-floe skilled in the capture of seals, else the entire company would have starved to death, since but a small portion of the provisions had been transferred to the floe when the vessel parted from it. The devices for sustaining their lives during the journey form interesting reading. Strange to relate, no one was seriously ill and no deaths occurred during this remarkable ice voyage. After drifting a while the _Polaris_ was purposely beached on the Greenland shore and the stores placed on land, where a house was built in which to spend the second winter. In the spring two boats were constructed in which the company started southward along the coast, where they were finally picked up by a whaling vessel. The conquest of the northeast passage was not achieved until the latter part of the century. In 1878 Baron Nordenskjold, a Swedish explorer commanding the _Vega_, entered the Arctic and sailed eastward along the Russian and Siberian coast. Nordenskjold was the first navigator to double Cape Chelyuskin, the northern cape of Asia. The _Vega_ reached Bering Strait where she was nipped by the ice-pack. In the following spring she reached Japan in safety. In 1879-80 Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka set out on an overland expedition northwestward for Hudson Bay, to gather knowledge concerning the great Arctic Plain of North America. Schwatka's was probably the longest sledge journey ever made up to that time. With a small party of men, his dog sledges covered a distance of three thousand miles. Schwatka found the skeletons of several members of Sir John Franklin's party. These he buried on King William Land. [Illustration: Peary's ship, the _Roosevelt_] In 1881 the De Long expedition, in the steam cruiser _Jeannette_, met disaster off the Siberian coast. The _Jeannette_ was sunk and her officers and crew in three boats abandoned her. One boat was never heard of afterward. De Long and his party starved in the delta swamps of the Lena River. Chief Engineer Melville and his party were rescued in the Lena River.