The Northwest Passage was not again made until Roald Amundsen navigated the tiny _Gjoa_, a sailing sloop with gasoline engine, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, 1903-06.
Yankee whalers each year had been venturing further north in Davis Strait and Baffin Bay and Bering Sea, but America had taken no active part in polar exploration until the sympathy aroused by the tragic disappearance of Franklin induced Henry Grinnell and George Peabody to send out the _Advance_ in charge of Elisha Kent Kane to search for Franklin north of Smith Sound.

In spite of inexperience, which resulted in scurvy, fatal accidents, privations, and the loss of his ship, Kane's achievements (1853-55) were very brilliant.

He discovered and entered Kane Basin, which forms the beginning of the passage to the polar ocean, explored both shores of the new sea, and outlined what has since been called the American route to the Pole.
Sixteen years later (1871) another American, Charles Francis Hall, who had gained much arctic experience by a successful search for additional traces and relics of Franklin (1862-69), sailed the _Polaris_ through Kane Basin and Kennedy Channel, also through Hall Basin and Robeson Channel, which he discovered, into the polar ocean itself, thus completing the exploration of the outlet which Kane had begun.

He took his vessel to the then unprecedented (for a ship) latitude of 82 deg.

11'.
But Hall's explorations, begun so auspiciously, were suddenly terminated by his tragic death in November from over-exertion caused by a long sledge journey.
When the ice began to move the ensuing year, his party sought to return, but the _Polaris_ was caught in the deadly grip of an impassable ice pack.