“ It was hard to see what was going on around us for the sky was overcast and the darkness was the kind which, as the time-honored phrase goes, you could cut with a knife, while the stinging snowdrift, whirling and eddying through the air, under the impetus of the screaming gale, added to the uncertainty as to what was about to happen from moment to moment. ”

“ The dredging and soundings were both carried on through a hole in the ice, which we had made at the stern of the ship. Here we had an igloo—a snow-house—for protection.
Peary had given me the first stimulus to seek [50] information in the Arctic; he had been the first to make me feel the fascination of all this sounding and dredging, mapping out the bed of the ocean, outlining the continental shelf. These things and the search for new land in latitudes where man has never set foot before are what appeal to me. Call it love of adventure if you will ”

“ It was light enough to see and the rest of the party came out of the camp to watch the end. As she went down the yards lodged on the ice and broke off; in such a narrow lane of water did she disappear. [92] It is always a tragic moment when a ship sinks, the ship that has been your home for months; it is not unlike losing some good and faithful friend. Twice before I had been shipwrecked, on both occasions on the southern coast of Newfoundland, so the sensation was not altogether new to me, but it was none the less poignant. ”

“ Travelling over the sea-ice at any time is altogether different from land travelling. On the sea-ice you have to spend a great deal of time looking about for good places to make the road for the sledging of supplies, for the ice is continually cracking and shifting and piling up in fantastic ridges from the pressure when the fissures close up, especially as near the land as we were, and its surface is so much rougher than the crystal levels of the lakes and ponds on which the landsman goes skating that there can hardly be said to be any comparison. ”

“ The wind was now coming from the east and the drifting snow whirled about us in clouds. Along here it was a toss-up whether it would be better to go along the sea-ice or travel on the land; the ice was piled in on the shore and so badly raftered that we had to use the pickaxe constantly, besides being drifted deep with soft snow, in which the dogs and sledge made heavy going and we ourselves on our snowshoes had much ado to pick our way along, and yet when we tried the land we found that the wind had blown the rocks bare of snow, which made hard going for the sledge. ”

“ We travelled hard all day. There was a strong northwest gale and the air was filled with drifting snow so that we could not see very far ahead. When we came to Cape Onman we were disappointed to find no arangas there; only the framework was left and we found out later that the people had moved to Koliuchin Island. We kept along the trail, which to our surprise took us away from the land and out on to the ice on the broad entrance to Koliuchin Bay, and presently we came to Koliuchin Island, a high formation, like a warship bottom up. ”

“ We had a pleasant ship’s company. I slept in the captain’s cabin. On the port side in a hammock was the Reverend Doctor Hoar, who was accompanying us as far as his mission station at Point Hope. In another hammock was Mr. Shields, the Alaskan Superintendent of Education, an able young man who has done wonders with the means at his disposal to foster the spirit of thrift among the Eskimo in their reindeer-herding. He knows every nook and cranny from Nome to Point Barrow and has won the respect and admiration of the Eskimo everywhere. ”

“ We consumed a great deal of time crossing the leads and even more in finding a place to cross, for sometimes, no matter how far we looked in either direction—and it was not safe for us to get too widely separated—we would find that in the middle of a lead there was a narrow platform of thin ice, not strong enough to bear the sledge. It called for the exercise of all the training I had gained in my twenty years of Newfoundland sealing and Arctic exploration with Peary to negotiate these constantly recurring leads with any degree of safety. ”

“ For the plan I had been evolving to make my way across Long Strait from Wrangell Island to the coast of Siberia and seeking an opportunity of getting help for the party here on the island was now about to be put to the test. We were on land but were a long way from civilization; we need not drown but we might starve or freeze to death if we could not get help within a reasonable time. With the decline of the whaling industry there was no chance that any ship would come so far out from the mainland so that the only way to expect help to reach the party was to go after it. ”

“ Your only chance of safety is that the men on the ship, who are constantly sweeping the horizon with powerful glasses, have foreseen what is going to happen and know where you are. If the ice is open near the ship they will steam over and pick you up. If not they will blow the whistle and let you know where the ship is, for the chances are that there is a storm breaking upon you with high winds and snow, so that you can see the ship only a short time. You have no dogs, no canvas, no snowshoes, no hot coffee, no stove. ”

“ Our latitude was too far north for us to see the real sun at this time of year; it was the distorted sun that we saw, like the mirage which one sees in a desert.
I remember that when I was a boy in the Methodist Academy in Brigus, the town where I was born in Newfoundland, the Anglo-American Telegraph superintendent at St. John’s once told us that when he was a young man at Cape Race a certain ship from Europe was expected at a given time but failed to appear. Finally they apparently [66] saw her heading in towards shore, and they launched a boat and went out to meet her. ”

“ Years of sealing in the waters about Newfoundland and of Arctic voyaging and ice-travel with Peary had given me a variety of experience to fall back [2] upon by way of comparison; the events of those fifteen months, I must say, justified the prophecy that I made in a letter to a Boston friend, just before we left Esquimault: “This will have the North Pole trip ‘beaten to a frazzle.’”
It did; and there were two main reasons why. ”

“ I asked Kerdrillo what he thought the chances were of there being any caribou or reindeer on the island. It is not an uncommon thing to find caribou on islands in Hudson Strait, which have drifted on the ice from the mainland, and there were, I knew, both these animals in plenty on the Siberian coast. I wondered, too, whether there might not be Arctic hare on the island. Kerdrillo said he thought there was so much snow that caribou and reindeer would be unlikely to stay where it would be so difficult for them to get food and he did not believe any were to be found. ”

“ The seal is the one indispensable animal of the Arctic. Its flesh is by no means disagreeable, though it has a general flavor of fish, which constitutes the seal’s chief food.
We continued our preparations for an extended stay in the ice. The ship was now some two feet lighter than she had been the middle of August when first frozen in; we had burned a good deal of coal and had removed coal, biscuit, beef, pemmican and numerous other things from the deck and also from the hold, sledging them to the heavy floe of which I have already spoken. ”

“ Once we were out on the running ice, as we should be by the next day, we should have much easier going, though we should undoubtedly have a great deal of open water to contend with. We made our igloo on the raftered ice. I was wearing snow-goggles and though I slept in them, so that I could get my eyes well accustomed to them, my left eye was now paining me a good deal. From the time we left Blossom Point I never again in our journey got a sight of Wrangell Island, on account of the overcast sky and the drifting snow. ”

“ Working our way along slowly, we finally got out to the slopes of the bay shore and stopped. The Eskimo were deep in a discussion of where they were and, as the baron told me, seemed clear enough about it, when suddenly the dogs started, pell-mell. I managed to drop on to the sledge and before I could do more than catch my breath we were tearing down hill at a terrific pace. The dogs had scented the reindeer and had started in their direction without more ado. How we got along without being flung bodily against the numerous boulders that lined our pathway and killed outright, I never knew ”

“ Sometimes the ice would be closed up and our Eskimo would get no seal, or the weather would be bad and the sky overcast, but when the ice parted and the water-lanes opened, if the air was fine, the seal would sometimes swim over to the edge of the floe, put their flippers up and crawl out of the water. Then they would lie out on the ice and sun themselves. After a time, as the sun disappeared and the raw wind came up, they would become cold from staying on the ice and then they would slide back into the water. ”

“ Whether we were to continue in the ice or get clear, it was well to have a good supply of emergency stores safe on the ice, because with any ship at sea there is always the danger of fire. When we got the Roosevelt to Cape Sheridan in 1905 and again in 1908 we unloaded her at once and put the supplies on land, building a house of the unopened biscuit boxes, so that if the ship should chance to get afire and burn up completely we should simply have had to walk back to Etah with our supplies and wait for our relief ship. ”

“ You take bigger chances in sealing than we averaged to take in the Arctic. You leave the ship in the morning and go out on the ice to kill seals. You take no tea, no tent or shelter of any kind; perhaps all you have is a little food in your bag. The weather is fine and offers no indications of change. You get off eight or ten miles from the ship, which is perhaps the only one in that vicinity, a couple of hundred miles from land, when suddenly the ice cracks and open leads form between you and the ship. ”

“ We always had fresh meat at least once a day, seal meat or, when we got any, later on, bear meat. For dessert we had ice-cream, in all flavors, or sherbet, pies, puddings, fancy cakes, and earlier had had watermelon and cantaloupe. At all times we had a great variety of canned fruits. In fact we were well supplied with about everything obtainable.
About this time we began putting the clock back to get the benefit of all the daylight. The men did not have to get up until breakfast-time but at ten o’clock they had to be ready for the day’s work. ”

“ I must make all speed to the mainland and then along the coast to East Cape, to get transportation across to Alaska, where I could send word to the Canadian Government. We had now been out of touch with civilization for months. We had brought food enough with us to the island to last the men eighty days, full rations; this would take them into June and [167] the caches along the trail from Shipwreck Camp could be drawn on while the ice was suitable for travel. By June the birds would be back again, and always the polar bear and the seal were reliable sources of supply. ”

“ Hadley finished the third Peary sledge on the eleventh. On the same day I had the Eskimo build a large snow igloo on the floe where we had our box-house of supplies, to furnish additional shelter for ourselves and the dogs. We began making wooden boxes for the protection of our Primus stoves in case we had to take to the ice. The Primus stove is an ingenious device for heating tea or whatever else you have that needs heating; it uses kerosene oil, ignited by means of alcohol, works somewhat like a plumber’s torch and has long been used by men engaged in Arctic work. ”

“ After a moment he came back and said that it might be an island like Wrangell Island but that it would be of no use to us. He seemed depressed by the hard day we had had, crossing so many leads. Finally he turned to me and said:
“We see no land, we no get to land; my mother, my father, tell me long time ago Eskimo get out on ice and drive away from Point Barrow never come back.” ”

“ From the shore side it was easy to see the basis of the formation of such rafters. A storm causes the moving ice to smash against and slide over the still ice and the pressure of the “irresistible force meeting the immovable body” throws the ice into fantastic, mountainous formations that are as weird [156] as that astounding picture of Chaos before the Creation that used to ornament the first volume of Ridpath’s “History of the World.” ”

“ Malloch was an ideal man for an exploring expedition like ours, brought face to face by circumstances with conditions that were calculated to test to the utmost a man’s real nature, for he was not only fully equipped in his own special field of science but beyond all that he was one of the most self-sacrificing men with whom it has ever been my lot to be thrown into intimate contact. ”

“ Then they had to keep on around the ship to a kind of track which we had dug in a snow-bank running at right angles to the ship; the track was just wide enough for a man to put both feet in and they had to go up the track and down again. This was no easy task and it was a cause for hilarious mirth to watch them trying to pass each other in the narrow path. Then they had to go to the dredge igloo where life-belts had been placed, each marked with its owner’s name. Each man had to find his own life-belt and put it on just as he would wear it if he were called upon to use it. ”

“ In some places we could get across easily; in others we had to make wide detours. At noon we stopped on the north side of a narrow lead and Kataktovick made a little snow igloo to serve as shelter while we rested for awhile. He understood perfectly how to use the Primus stove and he made some tea. While he was doing this I reconnoitered to the eastward, walking probably two miles before I came to a point where we could cross. When I returned to the sledge the Eskimo had the tea ready and we found it most refreshing. We could always eat bear meat whenever we were hungry. ”

“ A polar bear has a very acute sense of smell and can scent a human being in plenty of time to get away from him, and as a bear can go faster than a man it can escape easily, unless the hunter has dogs trained from puppy-hood to follow a bear and round him up, the way the dogs of Greenland can do. Of the bears that the McKinlay party shot the meat was simply cut off the bones, to have no useless weight to carry and some of it was cached on the ice, with the skins, and the rest brought with us. ”