THE HAYES EXPEDITION 241 



Sound, his quarters in Hartstene Bay being only some 

 twelve miles north of Cape Alexander. He had come 

 to verify the existence of the open sea and sail to the 

 Pole across it if he could ; and he verified it to his 

 own satisfaction. But he did not get so far north as 

 Morton, although he claimed to have done so, for he 

 climbed a cliff eight hundred feet high and looked out 

 over the open water in Kennedy Channel and did 

 not see the Greenland cliffs trending away northwards 

 within thirty miles of him, and visible all the way up 

 for two degrees north of Cape Constitution. Thus he 

 left the map as Kane left it, with Greenland cut off 

 short south of the eighty-first parallel, and his farthest 

 seems to have been the south point of Rawlings Bay, 

 where the Alert was forced on shore in August, 1870, 

 in 80 15'. 



" I climbed," he says, " the steep hillside to the top 

 of a ragged cliff, which I supposed to be about eight 

 hundred feet above the level of the sea. The view 

 which I had from this elevation furnished a solution of 

 the cause of my progress being arrested on the previous 

 day. The ice was everywhere in the same condition as 

 in the mouth of the bay across which I had endeavoured 

 to pass. A broad crack, starting from the middle of 

 the bay, stretched over the sea, and uniting with other 

 cracks as it meandered to the eastward, it expanded as 

 the delta of some mighty river discharging into the 

 ocean, and under a water-sky, which hung upon the 

 northern horizon, it was lost in the open sea. The sea 

 beneath me was a mottled sheet of white and dark 

 patches, these latter being either soft decaying ice or 

 places where the ice had wholly disappeared. These 



