NORTHWARDS
Let us probe the silent places, let us see what hick betide us;
Let us journey to a lonely land I know.
There's a whisper in the night wind, there's a star agleam to guide us;
For the will is calling, calling,—let us go. . . . .
The Crocker Land Expedition was organized under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, and the American Geographical Society. Contributors of funds and equipment to the expedition included, Yale, Harvard, Bowdoin, and Illinois universities, and the federal government.
The purpose of the expedition was to solve the last great geographical problem of the north: Is there in the Polar Sea a large body of land still undiscovered?
Geographers produced evidence contrary to this supposition. Oceanographers and tidal experts upheld it. Finally in 1906 Admiral Peary reported that from the height of Cape Thomas Hubbard in Axel Heiberg Land he believed he saw in the northwest 130 miles across the frozen wastes of the Polar Sea the "snow clad summits of a distant land." He named it Crocker Land after one of his backers, and the expedition hereinafter described had as its chief aim the verification of this report.
The objects of the expedition were scientific in character and may be briefly summarized as:
a. Actual visiting, reconnoitering, and mapping of Crocker Land or the sea ice at or about its supposed vicinity.
b. Scientific exploration of the region between Flagler Bay and Cape Thomas Hubbard; and of the Ellsemere Land interior.
c. The attainment of the Greenland Ice Cap east of Cape York.
d. The collecting of data and specimens along all scientific lines as far as may be practicable, including ethnology, geology, botany, seismology, ornithology, geophysics, terrestrial magnetism, meteorology, oceanography, and chemistry.
e. Cooperation with the U. S. Weather Bureau for practical as well as research purposes, through wireless connection with a Canadian station which was to have been erected in the Hudson Bay district the summer we sailed.
The scientific staff was as follows:
Donald B. MacMillan, A. B., A. M., leader and, ethnologist.
Fitzhugh Green, M. S., U. S. N., engineer and physicist.
W. E. Ekblaw, A. B., D. Sc., geologist and botanist.
M. C. Tanquary, A. B., A. M., Ph. D., zoologist and biologist.
Harrison J. Hunt, A. I ;., M. D., bacteriologist and surgeon.
Jerome Lee Allen, chief electrician, received orders from the Navy Department to join in New York; and Jonathan Small was engaged at Battle Harbor, Labrador as cook and mechanic.
The following excerpt from my orders defines my status on the expedition:
On June 2, 1913, you will regard yourself detached from duty under instruction . . . will proceed to New York, N. Y., and report on board the steam whaler Diana for duty in connection with the fitting out of the Crocker Land Expedition, and for duty on board that vessel in charge of topographic and magnetic surveys, wireless and hydrographic work to be undertaken in arctic regions. . . . .
JOSEPHUS DANIELS,
Secretary of the Navy.
* * *
Chronological summary of the expedition to date:
June 30, 1912. Due to start. Delayed by the drowning of George Borup, geologist of the expedition.
July 2, 1913. Sailed from the New York Navy Yard in the Diana.
July 16, 1913. Diana wrecked in Belle Isle Straits, Labrador.
August 1, 1913. Sailed from St. Johns, Newfoundland, in sealer Erik.
August 6, 1913. Sailed from Battle Harbor, Labrador.
August 30, 1913. Blocked by ice, established base in Foulke Fiord.
February to June, 1914. 'MacMillan and Green made 1280-mile sledge journey across Ellsemere Land and out on the Polar Sea, encroaching upon unexplored area, but failing to discover Crocker Land at or near its supposed location. Peary's cairns and records picked up.
June to December, 1914. Scientific and local exploratory work including inland ice. Wireless station set up outside Foulke Fiord on small island.
January to June, 1915: Sledge exploration of unknown portions of Ellsemere Land. Dr. Ekblaw discovered and mapped new area. Dr. Tanquary made extended visit to South Greenland and was badly frozen. Green, Hunt, and MacMillan on separate sledge trips north and west.
September, 1915. Ill-fated Cluett arrived, embarked expedition, was crushed in the ice and forced to winter in Parker Snow Bay with seventeen men aboard and provisions for only about three months.
September to December, 1915. Return to Etah and other Eskimo settlements in order to obtain food and skins for Cluett's crew, and to outfit a party hoping to reach South Greenland and thence to Copenhagen in hope of getting help.
January to June, 1916. One thousand miles of dog driving in race to catch little Danish oil steamer touching at South Greenland and thence to some English port. Allen, Tanquary, and Green reach Egedesminde and find that the war has confused all shipping and made any sort of plans nearly impossible.
July, 1916. Danish steamer Danmark chartered, coaled at Ivigtut, and dispatched to the relief of the other members of the expedition. Green and Allen take passage to Copenhagen.
August 3, 1916. Danmark last heard from.
July 6, 1917. New relief ship Neptune sailed from Sydney, N. S., under command of Capt. Bob Bartlett. This was the sixth vessel engaged for the expedition.
July, 1917. Doctors Hunt and Hovey, the latter a member of the Cluett's relief party, report via Faroe Islands that Danmark is fast in the ice, members of the expedition are safe but in dire need of help. MacMillan has discovered new land to the west of Axel Heiberg Land.
My books, papers and diaries are still in Greenland. I write entirely from memory after a busy winter and an eventful spring in the fleet. This outline is meant merely to convey the intentions of the expedition and its present situation to those of the service who may be interested or possibly only curious.
I returned from the north more empty handed than Ulysses and twice as dirty. But my companions have not yet come and my Odyssey is but a chapter in the work and the misery and the happiness our little party bore together until their misfortune became my fortune. While they endured the tragedy of waiting I knew the bliss of return. But the sweetness of my safety is yet tempered by their absence.
We sent them help but have heard no satisfactory word. Whether the relief ship reached them, or was crushed in the Melville ice or broke her back on a reef in those uncharted waters, we do not know. When the midnight sun will have burst the barriers of darkness and bitter cold we shall send again.
Germany has extended her blockade zone to 75° north latitude, within 200 miles of our base. The little Danish ship I caught last summer dare not make her annual voyage. But my friends expect her. Some of them will be in South Greenland to meet her. They must not be disappointed again. Wherefore it is assured that the new ship, a staunch Newfoundland sealer, be of the best, and her Captain, Bob Bartlett, of North Pole fame, a man who has yet to fail.
* * *
I reached Copenhagen one hot evening late last August. In the best hotel's best bedroom I interviewed the head waiter.
" Bring me poached eggs and a double meringue" . . . , I needed no list; I had carried my own in my mind for months . . . "and Brussels sprouts, escalloped artichokes, and broiled lobster. One large sirloin steak," . . . . I think I cautioned him……. to have it rare and the fat untrimmed. And finally, "chocolate cake and fruit and a large pitcher of milk."
For more than three years I had tasted none of these. Often in my dreams in my caribou skin bag had I been seated at such a banquet but always the hungry morning came before I was able to seize one morsel of the fragrant viands. Here was the dream come true, the ever present dream of one who sledges in the Arctic: Food.
Yet I did not reflect upon my providential deliverance from ice and cold. I regarded not at all the rosy future of my aspirations. Ideational processes bore all the crudity of creature desire. I simply sat and stuffed; and through it stared at the bed. Thrilled with anticipation I tried to imagine how real clean sheets and gentle bed springs would feel.
Clinging to a bunch of luscious grapes with one hand, with the other I loosened the cords of my Eskimo boots. But on the edge of the bed I lingered between the grapes and the sheets. For one wonderful moment I saw life in its true values: the comfort of enough: the luxury of ease; the beauty of simply living.
I slipped out of my primitive skin garments and crawled in. To my dying day shall I remember in all vividness the unspeakable sensuous rapture of that experience. The coolness and exquisite softness of my coverings soothed me. I fell asleep. The past drifted away like mist before cool evening breezes. The rush and the pound of blizzards; the day-long torture of rough and nubbled sea-ice ; the stench of foul igloos; the aching muscles. All were no longer even memories. . . . .
I awoke. . . . Where was I? Ugh! what air; not its closeness or its smell, I was used to them, but its terrible strangeness. . . . . No comforting wail of a lonely dog; only a deathlike stillness broken now and then by a distant but dreadful rattle. No exhilarating slam and snap of the gale; just a creeping breath which stirred my curtain in a ghostlike way.
I fought off my uneasiness but failed. I got up and looked out through the window. Then I knew the truth. Gray dawn lit the rectangle of sky above and the long narrow coffin-like street below. But my view stopped short at the opposite wall. . . . . No wide spaces to a crimson horizon. No red towering cliffs backed up to the clean ice shimmering misty white against the blue sky. No crashing, lumbering ice-pack sweeping like a live thing into the fire in the south. No sleeping dogs half buried in the snow and wanting but a word to leap into life. Not even a circling raven. . . . . Only the loathsome filth of burrowing, building man and the faint twitching of his sleeping vanity.
An indescribable loneliness seized me. Already man was awakening; soon he would fill the streets. I should know him, speak to him of the beauty of the Great White North and of my longing for it. Yet never, never would he understand.
* * *
Many wonder why we go into the Arctic. I think it must be the adventure. As a boy I lived in an atmosphere of adventure. The little western town where I was born knew fewer Indians in its bloodiest days than I saw forty years later when written romance flooded my imagination like wine. Now, with my memories of bear and ice-pack, stand unashamed crisp winter nights on that white ribbon the River Platte hangs in January across the prairies. I hear again the soft crunch of moccasins in the snow and a boy's clean whistle across the clearing where one faint light marked the shack we had built.
Followed long years of a boy's school drudgery. But always like jewels in a tarnished ring glisten those bright days in the wild wide country where Indians and Eskimos could be had for the wishing and dogs were human companions.
I entered the navy like most of us, thrilled by the glamor of it all. But I concealed my specific motive: One great portion of the earth remained about which man could yet surmise. There might I find life past imagination. I knew arctic literature as the theologist knows his bible. I perceived that most arctic explorers had been naval officers: Barrow, Franklin, Kane, Nares, Beaumont, Abruzzi, Shackleton, Scott and Peary, every one of them. Annapolis was the gateway to my desire.
My earlier disappointments are too personal for publication. And on that warm July evening in 1908 when I saw Peary leave Long Island Sound for his last successful expedition I felt that I had lived in vain.
But the Pole is only a point; while the Polar Sea is hundreds of thousands of square miles in area. Much exploration remained to be done; and Peary himself urged inquiry across the vast unexplored area north of the American Archipelago. From Cape Thomas Hubbard, the northern extremity of Axel Heiberg Land, in June, 1906, Peary scanned the northern horizon. He writes: "The clear day greatly favored my work in making a round of angles; and with glasses I could make out apparently a little more distinctly in the northwest above the ice horizon the snow clad summits of a distant land." He named his discovery Crocker Land.
Geologists politely controverted this report. Experiment has proved that when a sphere of viscous matter is revolved it tends to assume the form of a tetrahedron with the axis of revolution through one apex and the center of one plane. Apices and surfaces are distinct protuberances and flattenings on the spherical area. Granting that the earth may be considered as formerly if not at present viscous to a sufficient degree, this hypothesis may be applied to the present distribution of land and sea. The result is startling. American continents and shallows bulge to a very discernible .dihedral angle whose faces submerge in the Pacific and our great central plains. Northwest Canada and Alaska rise to a grand apex with crests like those of St. Elias and McKinley to aid the imagination. Another vast earth ridge lies between Europe and Asia. A third of lesser apparent magnitude looms along the west Pacific islets, whose cones are a series of gigantic pickets out of the sea.
This is sufficient to establish the geometrical paradox; though so far we cannot positively determine toward which axis it is the edges converge. Cape Horn, Cape Good Hope, and South East Cape (Tasmania) leave little doubt in our minds. Bit when we analyze the magnificent work of Shackleton, Amundsen, and Scott we see that it is the icy pinnacle of the vast antarctic continent towards which our great planetary gables point.
The North Pole must therefore be located at the center of the fourth tetrahedral surface, which is bounded by an equilateral triangle whose sides may roughly be paralleled by lines drawn from central Alaska to the ridge of the Greenland ice-cap, and from these points to somewhere near the center of the Gulf of Obi at the northern end of the Ural Range in western Siberia. Of course the actual triangle we imagine lies in a more southern latitude. But for the purpose of this discussion bounding points within the arctic regions are more elucidating. Finally Peary's soundings near the Pole gave a depth of about 1500 fathoms, which is not far from the elevation of the south Polar Plateau (11,000 feet), or the average altitudes at or near the apices in Alaska, Greenland, and Siberia.
Hence the geologists and physiographists concluded that the Polar Sea would prove to be a vast basin analogous to our other ocean areas and sloping only very gradually to the continental shelves which bound it. Contributing to this belief is the fact that Sverdrup reported the Grant Land earth folds grew gradually less sharp near the coast, while the shelving plains of the North American Barren Lands and the Siberian steppes completed the testimony.
So it carne about that the Crocker Land Expedition was based upon a controversy, the eyes of the traveller pitted against the theories of the scientists. And, as I write, there remain among those who ponder upon such obscurities much cause for mystification. MacMillan and I penetrated the Polar Sea well beyond the point marked land by Peary, and found only a white desolation of tide-ruptured ice. Yet, upon our return, we too saw from the heights of the northernmost cape a land, or something so like land, that had we not been out we too should have come back certain of its existence.
But .most tempting of all, at least to me, still remains: Within the inception of the expedition lay embedded a legend of the Eskimos which described a distant oasis inhabited by their own race. So perfect was this spot, say they, in its abundance of game and sunlight that he who settled there whether from fortune or design, never returned. The bliss of endless seasons and easy plenty at once cleared memory of mother and wife and even children—the Eskimo's most loved possession. Thus were accounted for those who went away into the night and stayed. To be sure there were the Klavitogs, spirits of the Inland Ice; those whom the blizzard and the darkness slew; many and many the whispering invisible shadows of the glaciers; and by almost every blue-black berg of the long silent night dwelt some ghostly relic of one who had been swallowed up by the particular demon of that spot. But there were always some inexplicably absent who had departed with deceit and through many seasons had retained their silence. These missing members of the tribe might well be found in such an isolated spot as the one we sought. While the younger hunters reiterated no, the older Angekogs (Medicine Men) agreed upon a common acceptance of the truth that the land was really nearer than many could guess.
Our white Angekogs also said "no," and spun a putty ball to prove their contention. Finally though, there set eyes upon the distant shores a sailorman, a breed as you well may know with none of the barbarian's narrow mysticism, and yet possessing imagination which in the gelid scientist is too often atrophied. Nearly twenty years after his first reconnaissance upon the Greenland Ice Cap, Peary gave us this problem in concrete form.
I cannot give the full debate which covered a period of several years before we left. It is interesting to note that Capt. Kellett and others sailing north of Alaska had long before reported land to the northward. Dr. R. A. Harris, tidal expert of the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, published in the National Geographic Magazine of June, 1904, his study of tides, winds, ice conditions and ocean temperatures. He showed that movement of tides and currents across the top of the world from the Franz Joseph archipelago and Spitzbergen to Bering Strait along Alaska is mysteriously retarded. He argued that the only solution was Crocker Land.
But I liked the legend best. Let sages shake their dice box of facts and figures and roll a loaded combination to their own .gain. The game which I would play is lose-all win-all and men at the board. What if the Polar Sea were ice afloat and the bottom a thousand fathoms down? Land had been seen. Cold could not mar the dream. Volcanic ashes have fallen in Greenland; the Aleutians are buried furnaces. If there be an ice-cooled desert why not a steam-heated Polar Paradise? Find your Jules Verne and follow me to the center of the earth through the Iceland crater!
Men can live anywhere. Within our generation some dozen of tribes have been found who never before saw a white man. Scarcely live years ago Stefannsson stumbled upon strange tribes in Coronation Gulf north of Canada who thought him a god. Not even a tradition had they of his kind. Again it is told that in the center of the Greenland ice-desert lies a populous valley where eider ducks and ptarmigan are tame, and the seal come to the igloos for food. Ridiculous, you say? Not at all. But four times has Greenland been crossed, and Greenland is one thousand five hundred miles from tip to tip, close upon ten thousand feet in altitude, and such endless blizzards rage upon its great white breast as froze the eyes of Captain Koch's ponies (in 1912) until they rolled out of their sockets. "They're true, these legends, every one of them—until they're disproved," exclaimed one adventurer. He, I say, was a true adventurer.
Yea I sang as I now sing when the Prehistoric Spring
Made the piled Biscayan ice-pack split and shove;
And the troll and gnome and dwerg,
And the gods of cliff and berg
Were about ine and beneath me and above.
* * *
Only seven men could go. The horrors of past expeditions when scores of men perished in a single arctic night had proved the danger of a large personnel. MacMillan, who has been to sea for years, has explored Labrador and accompanied Peary on his North Pole trip, was leader of the expedition. He is a graduate of Bowdoin and Harvard where he specialized in ethnology and ornithology. His experience has been a thorough apprenticeship for a work which requires all of the resource and originality within the compass of man's intelligence.
Dr. M. C. Tanquary was our zoologist and entomologist. He also took an active part in all scientific and sledging work. His past years have been spent under the government and in several university laboratories.
Dr. W. E. Ekblaw undertook all geological and botanical investigations. He became one of the most expert dog drivers in the party and in 1915 led his own division through Greely Fiord which had never before been traversed by any man.
J. L. Allen, chief electrician, was wireless operator and gas engine expert. He received special training at the general electric shops and factories and had been a government radio man for a number of years. J. C. Small, for nine years leading man at the Peaked Hill Life Saving Station, Cape Cod, was our general handy man. He was an excellent carpenter and had built boats ice a boy.
Prior to leaving I received special instruction in seismology and meteorology and underwent a short course of training at the Carnegie Institute in Washington along the lines of terrestrial magnetism. Each man concentrated upon his own work under the leader's direction, but all cooperated in such a way that scarcely any result or record from calibration to cooking and carpentering, from research to repairing, was got that did not bear the direct contribution of every member of the expedition.
Dr. Harrison J. Hunt was the surgeon. He is a brother of Commander W. M. Hunt, U. S. N. I mention him out of the list of the exploring staff of the expedition as his duties were to have been only in connection with our health and the bacteriological work. However, when we set out to travel and hunt, to our surprise the sedentary surgeon proved nearly the best of the crowd. His experience at sea and in the woods gave him a head start which even the Eskimos were quick to notice when they remarked that the big doctor would be a tribesman before anyone else of our party.
Those are the names and occupations of the men. Their qualifications and personal characteristics I need not describe except to congratulate myself on having served with them. Confined as we were in just a shanty, we knew each other as our own mothers never knew us; and such exceeding discrimination as could with my intimacy justly depict their vices and virtues I have not got. Suffice it to say that they wore amazingly well.
* * *
We gathered in New York towards the end of June. Each had his own part of the equipment to label and see aboard ship, no one who has not been connected with some such expedition can imagine the indescribable multitudinousness of its details. Later we found thermograph blanks for twenty-five years but no cake turner. Even before we unpacked we were longing for woolen wristlets and yet had remembered to bring enough dehydro spinach to feed the whole tribe of Eskimos. Jot Small seriously contemplated distilling some kind of patent medicine from the spinach. I think he ended by replenishing his rather scanty tobacco supply with it.
System was by no means lacking. We knew the weights to an ounce of everything from the torsionless fiber of the magnetometer to the seventeen tons of Spratt's Dog Biscuit. Famous dieticians and physiologists had contributed their theories to the choice of our provisions. Years of experience by explorers in every part of the world had gone into the practicality of the food values we assigned. Our rations must meet the requirements of cold, utter lack of resources and complete isolation. Our bodies must be highly fueled for the exhausting strains of low temperatures, but our nerves and our palates must be refreshed by the change, which, when absent, means rotten gums and scurvy madness.
We expected skins from the Eskimos but could not count on them. So far as we knew our coal would last; but a score of ships have foundered north and left their men fuelless. The science of arctic travel demands stoves, food, clothes, sledges, and other equipment of mathematical precision as regards their design and application. No more beautiful proof to this can be found than the experience of Dr. Porsild the Danish scientist who investigated sledge development through the tribes and discovered that ages of experiment had led these real cave-men to cut their komotik bows in an almost perfect logarithmic curve which can be mathematically proved to absorb the shocks of ice collisions more efficiently than any other form.
Each -ology of the ten we boasted meant nothing without its own paraphernalia. We must equip a complete wireless station, a full chemical and physical laboratory, machine shop, carpenter shop, photographic room; and, most important of all, a properly supplied kitchen and pantry . . . . for upon them depends much of the content and success of any work. Small wonder is it then that the expedition's stores on the dock at the New York Navy Yard quite concealed our little vessel except for her rakish masts.
The Diana was a 400 ton sealing vessel out of St. Johns. Her bow was of solid oak for some seven feet abaft the stem and her enormous timbers reduced the cargo space perceptibly. Her lines were typically ice-riding with the long projecting bow so fashioned as to mount and split the jagged underrunning floes.
Her small but powerful engines were set well aft. With tilted smoke pipe and barrel tops she was true to the type of arctic vessel. Of course ice navigation forbids bilge keels; and northern gales seemed anticipated in the crouch of her bridge which reminded one of a man's shoulders braced to meet the seas. I cannot leave her without a word about her innate fragrance, a sublimation of many seasons sealing, redistilled by the blistering June sun and painfully acute to us effeminate creatures who bathed each morning and paid tribute to Lord Colgate in nine different forms.
At last, as in all narratives, the great day came. Admiral (then Captain) Gleaves supplied us with dock parties and tugs. Commander Ryan broke out his band and rendered routine honors beginning with the The Girl I Left Behind Me, and not forgetting to remind us of our destination by The Good Old Summer Time. The crowd waved; the movie men cranked; "Leg-go," shouted our down east skipper, and we were off.
. . . . Off to the Ends of the World, to the edge of the day and the night,
Where a man may live as the first Man lived,
And just to live is a fight.
At Boston we took on eleven tons of pemmican, man and dog. This is a mixture of nearly equal amounts of the best rare beef and pure suet mixed and pressed into air tight tins. The latter when sealed are subjected to a roasting temperature just long enough to break down the fleshy tissues and allow the grease to permeate the meat. To the man pemmican was added a small amount of raisins to offset the constipating effect of the large quantities of tea we drank. The nutritious value of this food is very great and strange to say men do not tire of it. A pound a day was the allowance and together with one pound of army hard tack formed the field ration for one day. In addition we boiled tea night and morning.
We hoped to make more of the dog-biscuit of which we took on seventeen tons at Sydney, Nova Scotia. But the dogs never learned to relish it. We also coaled at this port and filled not only the hold bunkers but the waist deck also. The Diana now seemed dangerously low in the water but we were consoled by the greediness of her boilers which lightened her inches on every day's run.
Between Newfoundland and Labrador Belle Isle Straits flood ceaselessly to and fro. This to-and-froness is the only poetic thing about them. Fog and ice, reef and wind and tide there await the incautious navigator. In self defence I mention the fact that we were on a chartered ship and entirely helpless in the matter of her piloting. But we had confidence in our captain and sang and made tea in cosy security that crisp July afternoon in the Gulf of St. Lawrence as we rested from our day's toil of restowing cargo.
The captain joined the mate on the bridge and we could hear bits of a shouted conversation. We discovered the sad truth early: the mate was very deaf in his starboard car and could see only indistinctly with his port eye. We tried in vain to replace him, but were assured that his knowledge of arctic waters had become a sense in itself which rose above the assistance of common eyes or ears. This the captain must have believed, for, in spite of the mist which hung over us, and the ice-bergs we all too narrowly avoided, and the rapidly rising gale, the captain saw fit to go below and refresh himself with some Jamaica rum we never knew he had until the trouble was all over.
As sea-going men MacMillan, Small, and myself went on deck from time to time to see how things were going. We turned in about eleven just abaft the deck house where the atmosphere was less, dense than in the little close cabin below. About seven bells I was aroused by an altercation on the bridge but dozed off again when I recognized the captain's voice. He was accustomed to while away many a long hour by arguing with the cook or mate or helmsman, whichever of them was willing to oppose his views on politics, religion, or the fish market.
My next impression was a crunching shock followed by a sensation of going down in an elevator. A moment of dead silence followed. Then from the mate, "hard up, — —you! Hard up!" in a kind of rasping scream.
He was hard up all right, and hard on too. The ill-fated Diana had mounted some hidden ridge and then toppled over until her bulwarks were awash. But more dreadful than the rocks under foot was a looming shadow which threatened our port bow. It seemed to terrify the men. "She's a turnin' now," I heard one gasp, and did not understand the fear in his voice until in the Baffin pack I saw a million tons of ice tremble, topple, and crash furiously into the sea. Had that man not been mistaken I might never have written of his hysterical apprehension.
"Where's the captain?" demanded some impatient member of our ill-fated expedition. A burst of orders drowned him. "Why don't you back her?" It was the mate in a state of growing courage which his anger at everyone else seemed to bring him. He was answered by a roar from the engine room hatch where the fat chief's bald head showed in the darkness, "Ye blind old fool, ye've capsized me whole b'iler with yer rottenness! Back her yerself, and be damned to ye!"
In the darkness and confusion no one saw the captain; but we smelled him the moment he arrived. The rum had done its work. He only chuckled and remarked tipsily: "It'sh a bit o' lisht she has, ain't it?"
A tumult of shouts came from the forecastle. All hands were up and several had lit lanterns. Everyone carried a bundle. They were a docile enough crowd ordinarily; now they seemed possessed. This madness included even two of the officers. They were cutting something adrift. I looked about for someone still sane and found the third mate.
"What in hell are you doing?"
"We're sinkin', sir; we're a-goin' down."
I laughed at him. "We're already down as far as we can go," I said. It was as if I had shaken him. He stiffened in his intensity. "No, no, sir; that's just it. It's the same as the Weymouth. She slid off the reef, the berg split a-top of her, and they was all lost."
A scraping clatter on the skid frames interrupted him. He leaped clear of a line showing black by his flickering lantern. A large object shot overboard with a great splash. It was our sailing dory. She dived, struck the reef nose on and floated crazily half-full of water.
The truth was that the crew thought we were on the Newfoundland side. Many a cousin, brother, and son had they buried between the surf and the ledges of that vicious shore. They were panic stricken and would have abandoned us to our fate had not someone inspired seized a shovel and crying, "Float her off!", begun to jettison our deckload of coal. Like sheep the poor wretches followed and before long regained their customary apathy enough to realize that the sea was growing safely calm and the sound of low surf to port placed the beach not far away.
Followed days on end of toil and anxiety. By thimblefuls it seemed we carried off our coal and supplies and equipment to the low, desolate beach. Two fishing smacks and several roomy trap-boats were commandeered and their crews impressed into our service. Luckily most of the fishermen had seen or heard of MacMillan and were willing to take his word for payment. At a critical moment they struck for higher wages, and at the same time some scoundrel produced enough whisky to petrify our already worthless crew. All would have been lost had not a small Canadian customs steamer, the Stella Maris, been passing at this time. She kindly (bill came later) came to our assistance and finally pulled us off. We had saved most of our belongings but the Diana was valueless and her men demoralized. But we had much to be thankful for. Had any but the calmest weather filled those fifty hours we should have lost every stitch and stick we owned. And the miracle is more amazing when one knows the treachery of that storm-ridden coast.
We limped up to Battle Harbor, twenty miles north. The skipper was very sober and the mate now entirely deaf to all comment. "It was them iron bindings on th' dog-biscuit cases what done it," he confided to me. "But she'd never made it, never. With her deck load she was loggy. I ain't in me whole life seen nothin’ like it, never. Never. . . . . " and had he added a "more" he wouldn't have been so unlike the Raven . . . . there with his dark peaked face and bedraggled appearance . . . . . And what he said seemed all true in the minds of those forward who to our surprise gladly forfeited a summer's pay to be free from what they considered an overladen ship.
Take heed you who would sail out of the trade paths of the sea. Load Confidence with your cargo. The Diana had temperamental pessimism on her bridge. A stevedore strike had left us with a poorly stowed hold. Deck loading was necessary. It became the cue to complaint, the cause of sorrow, and ultimately—as we learned from the assistant engineer who had it at the scuttlebutt—the real reason for our grounding.
At Battle Harbor we received a radio to the effect that we must come to St. Johns and explain ourselves to the Diana's owners before they would let us have another vessel. She leaked badly and so far as any of us knew her bottom might drop out at any minute. The crew steadfastly refused to budge.
But we did go. We patched her and took a chance. Three vile days at sea came next, then a maddening delay in St. Johns where we must entirely recoal, reman and refit.
Our next venture in steam sealers was the Erik. She was more roomy than our first craft but old as the Ark and of motive power nearly as obscure. I cannot describe her without involving Newfoundland history from St. Anthony to St. Johns, for in that stretch of coast lives no family who within the past three generations has not contributed to her personnel.
On August 1, we put out of the long bottle-shaped harbor and set our course once more to the north. On this day we were due to be at Cape York, two weeks behind schedule already! The North will not wait; it must be entered when the icy gates are open. When they shut winter falls with awful suddenness and intensity. We must win this time, we felt, and rejoiced to be once more on our way.
Four days later we left Battle Harbor. The night before we sailed we sang hymns in Dr. Grenfell’s house and otherwise enjoyed this last taste of civilization. Next morning while we were unmooring the inevitable drunken sailor was on hand to see us off. Tom Somebody had obtained a bottle of gin and marched about our decks steeped in maudlin sorrow that we were going away never to return. Finally we managed to inveigle him back to his own ship, the Southern Cross, long famous in the annals of arctic exploration. Poor fellow; his concern for us we well remembered when later we learned that in the following sealing season the Southern Cross went down with 176 souls aboard including Tom.
Labrador has been termed the Norway of North America, partly in exploitation of the steamship lines which mother its fishing colonies. But the resemblance is about as close as in most other cases of our fatuous nomenclature which too often has been the combined result of alcoholic remorse and nostalgic melancholia. More northern inlets are guarded by high cliffs and lofty plateaus but glacial desolation is too recent for more than a semi-arctic beauty. In geological yesterday huge ice-harrows leveled the upper areas of our continent, and receding left devastation like a war plague in their path. To-day the flattened muskeg reeks of earth gore and the hollows between the ground-down hills are weltering shallows of lake chains. Instead of maggots even more dreadful pests of savage black flies and virulent mosquitoes beset the traveller who dares intrude. Some rugged souls go up there in the summer months and take their salmon at the icy headwaters of Hamilton Inlet, or trade with the Southern Eskimos at Nain and Okkak. But one and all they return and catalogue their perils for our morbid delectation; and occasionally, like Hubbard, they never return.
There are three classes of inhabitants in Labrador, and I cannot say which is the lowest, for all are dirty, ignorant, and disconsolate. The Nascauppees are real Indians and dress in blankets, moccassins, and no breeches at 60° below zero. The Southern Eskimos die of tuberculosis and leave their savings to the Moravian Missions. The Olivias are the wretched white settlers so called from their apathetic answer to any sympathetic inquiries about their plight: "I-live-here" (Oi-liv-ia).
We set our course for South Greenland. A five day gale with fog and sleet made navigation difficult and life a little gray. But the evenings lengthened as we increased our latitude until there was only a twilight at night and ice-bergs could be dodged with a reasonable degree of safety.
Our first view of Greenland was memorable. For days we had tortured our lungs with damp, raw fog. On the thirteenth of August it thinned. Suddenly the sun blazed out red like a fevered eye. It bore due north; the clock pointed midnight. Along a fiery horizon rolled the great flaming disc. Gradually the mist dispelled. The sky was gloriously full of crimson, green, and violet; and the sea blue-black by contrast. One by one huge glistening bergs grew out of the vaporous distance, and like monstrous marble mile-stones, marked our perspective down to the distant shores which finally were visible.
Ice, endless ice, they were, with here and there jutting sienna nunataks like brown plums and burnt citron in a white iced cake. Mounting shimmering into the sky was the limitless expanse of the wind-dimpled ice-cap forged in massive lines by winter blizzards yet with viscous insistance oozing down into the sea. Miles away as we were, we still could hear the dull thunder of calving bergs and occasionally could see the birth of one of those mammoth islands of ice. Here and there a seal porpoised. Northern gulls dotted the sea like rice. The air was now clean and crisp. So beautiful, so beautiful! but oh, how coldly so!
Next morning we made Cape York, the southern limit of the Whale Sound tribe of Eskimos. It must be understood that of the thirty odd thousand Eskimos alive those in Alaska, Labrador, Hudson Bay and South Greenland are more or less in contact with civilization. Since traders reach them or they reach the traders they are not so independent as the few tribes in the northern archipelago and Barren Grounds who know the white men mostly by tradition and count in no way upon outside assistance. Fire arms they know not; and such implements of hunting and of domestic use are entirely original and created with the scanty resources at their command.
The little tribe with whom we intended to live belonged to the unspoiled type. Early British expeditions reported them savage and treacherous. It is possible that this was assumed after several centuries’ experience with the North American Indian; and an Eskimo is inclined to do as he is done by. Peary, however, gained their confidence and fairly won their friendship and admiration. They speak of him as "the white man who never lied"; as "the one who was always ready to work in the morning"; and as "he (the white man) who dares comes back.” He found them child-like and often unreliable, but usually honest and loyal, and capable of work and hardship to an incredible extent. Endless generations of the fight they wage for existence has made them almost perfect in the art of arctic travel. Peary cleverly recognized their value as assistants, thereby out-doing his predecessors until he finally reached the Pole.
Long before we could make out the tupiks (skin tents) up under the cliffs three snaky kayaks darting in and out among the placid floes rushed to greet the ship. MacMillan braced himself on the bill-board.
"Ah-gei-teq, Ah-gei-teq, O-meak-suaq-mut!" (Come out aboard the ship.)
"Ah-shu-daq; .Shein-ak-sün-naiq!" (Of course we will. How good it is to see you again.)
One caught our heaving line. He came bounding up the side like a monkey and shook hands all around, white-man fashion. He was short and round and brown. His fat jolly face and long Indian hair shone with grease and perspiration—the thermometer was nearly 35° F.! Somehow he reminded me of Bud Fisher's Jeff after a shave. He gave an impression of short-legged fatuousness which welcomed any imposition. The first was the cook's, who from the rear poured ammonia on him in order if possible to mitigate the poor barbarian's pungent unwashedness.
Kiotaq sprang away, but not in anger. "Tesaq! Tesaq! Clim-iutsiut imuk soalooq!" (Stop it! you make me smell like dog-water.) And his roars of laughter were turned with ours upon the cook who had more meatiness than manners.
MacMillan quickly learned the news from Kiotaq. Time was precious and we must pick up our new men. It was with a curious thrill I listened to this ancient language which never has acquired the abstract, and calls love by the act it implies; and for hatred substitutes some definite cruelty. In Eskimo I do not hate you; I say that "you are a man whom I may some day harpoon like a walrus, the devil not preventing me!" The smooth deep syllables of the speech pleased our ears. Expressive intonation made unintelligible words full of significance. Tah-wah-neq, for instance, means distant. The measure of the distance is expressed by repetition and inflection. Great distance is tah-wah-neq uttered many tunes in low but increasingly highly pitched tones which in the end leave the listener convinced of the unspeakable magnitude of a journey to the place in question, and connotes all the weary miles and impassable ice-fields in between, with starving dogs and torturing snow-filled gales. So picturesque and expressive is all their spoken intercourse that long before I learned the language I loved to sit and follow the rich realism of Eskimo conversation. Phlegmatic as the native is in the face of peril and hardship, he loves few pastimes better than to give himself over to a tale of chase and kill wherein he can fairly forget himself in a fervor of dramatic narrative and description.
I learned most on the sledge trips. Days when I have lain storm-bound in a snow igloo I have waited like a Quaker for inspiration to strike one of the hunters. Faintly through the thick snow walls would come the throb and the hiss of the blinding crushing storm. Occasionally a shivering dog took his nose from out his protecting tail and wailed a long, wolfish complaint against the bitter cruelty of cold and hunger. "That dog's song," begins Egingwaq, " brings before my eyes-no-longer-young the passing of the third moon of the second sun after full ice last ran to Ak-pan-eq. Long, long were the sleeps which came; for Innuit greatly hungered are not noticeably beyond the teams which lie weak and await death."
My brother's babies fell ill. I think in their hunger they cut seal skins, which we must eat, in pieces too large. Ootaq, the greatly Angekoq came. He sang like yonder dog. Spirits unseen to us fearful wretches came to the igloo's front. With them he communed, singing the while strange chants unlike those conceived of human voice. Our last kioq (meat soup) went to give him strength."
"He ceased. ‘Thou art to be happy,' said he, 'for all thy misery.' . . . . Go forth into the night. Go, and follow not any trail of whim or memory. Listen well for the hunger cry of a dog whose voice shall be my own. . . . .'. No more had I from Ootaq; but a coil of excellent aglunaq (sealskin line) gave I him in gratitude."
"Out to my skeletons of dogs I staggered and hitched them to my sledge already cut short for weight. Into the dreadful darkness of the night I drove and the low thin moon showed me many flying spirits in the gray vapors of the black leads. One evil fox jeered me."
"Suddenly from the ice came a cry. My dogs whimpered; I trembled. It was Ootaq's own voice but surely from the throat of a dog. I hurled my long whip into the King. He screamed with pain. A great ways we followed the Thing. Twice around rolled the moon then hid under the edge of the world. But still pursued the voice of Ootaq in the throat of a dog."
“Little more can I relate, for a kind of Pibloktoq (hysteria) came upon me. I know not when I saw first the great she bear and her three cubs. I slew her madly, driving my lance clean through her blood hot heart. I ate the heart. My strength returned. Before the great star had crawled half around I was home. Two seal igloos I crossed. One fat seal I added to my load of bear flesh. I entered my stone house and rejoiced while all fed. But Ootoq had not reached his son's camp whither he had gone. On the contrary he drove up into the Sermilksuaq (great Inland Ice), became a Klavitoq, and now dwells in the second crevasse in the long glacier to the right of Silwaddiq (the Sea Pigeon Cliff)."
All the tales were not like this. In fact every one was different and each had its touch of mystery, while none was lacking in action and climax; and all of them held me to the end for what of happiness or death might follow. After a particularly long and stirring recital it was customary to start the little kerosene or blubber lamp and put the tea pot on for a mug up, and over our mild brew discuss the bewildering ways of devils and the creatures they animated.
With something of this spirit we joined Kiotaq at tea before he left the Erik. We then noted that in the space of a short half hour he had gathered bits of wood, nails, bolts, broken knives and buttons until the hood of his shirt in which he carried them bulged like a junk bag. He piloted its out around the Cape as we stood up toward the next settlement. Every time we crossed an ice-free lane and aimed for the farther edge he hung to any-thing within reach and danced in an ecstasy of combined joy and apprehension for the collision. Each floe we crashed upon and split drew from him ejaculations of relief and glee. "We do it just like the biggest devil," he declared after each victory.
He was loth to leave but we gently bade him take to his native canoe and helped him overboard. He sprinted away with never so much as a glance over his shoulder. He was hastening to the huddled cluster of figures we saw far back and up on the talus slope l where the two families living there awaited their first news of the white man's would. For days thereafter the old man would relate- to them every gesture and word of the strangers, and describe in minutest detail each mystifying feature of the huge boat which "pushed itself."
Our next port of call was Umanak in North Star Bay. I give the Eskimo names not of settlements but of settling places. In the whole tribe there are about thirty-five families; these lead an entirely nomadic life. Rarely does a hunter remain more than two seasons in one spot. Game of course is the deciding factor, not so much its quantity as its kind. North are the bears and the caribou. But the Innuit tires of their lusciousness and longs for the juicy narwhal and rancid walrus. South are the seals and the small game, but men must have bear skins for their breeches and caribou skins for their sleeping bags. And besides all this "what pleasure," they say, "is there in the endless company of one whose stories have all been told?"
So they wander back and forth as the years glide by; but always are the stopping places the same. These are protected spots usually at the foot of southern exposures, where a heavy talus is a source of soil and the bird cliffs above are responsible for the necessary fertilization. A handful of stone igloos and as many tent rings of small boulders mark the habitations, many of them hundreds of years old. We found some whose age was to be measured only in geological time, their walls having been filled by glacial till or the silt of a glacier's stream due to the advance or retreat of the ice. Others lay half in the sea their foundations having rested upon land gradually submerging.
Umanak (the Heart) is so-called, from the shape of an isolated table of rock which marks the fiord's entrance. Several families had their tents on the low fore shore. Our plan was to pick up the hunters as Peary did, transport them to our base and employ them and their teams not only in helping us procure the large amount of meat necessary for our host of dogs but also for much other irksome labor such as the handling of coal and stores in which we were sadly handicapped by our small number. Strangely enough they never shirked the grinding hardships of cold and hunger and yet shrank from many useful routine tasks at home which in their primitive code belonged to the women folk.
This division of tasks is an index to the tribal culture. I have seen. Nucarpingwaq shiver for hours in fruitless endeavor to capture a seal he knew was too small to pay for his trouble; and on his return sit in chaste complacency while his diminutive wife risked her life to carry huge lumps of fresh-water ice across the tide torn ice foot in order that her lord and master might have tea. And he was a good Eskimo, an expert with his harpoon and whip, and proved one of our most valuable men. He came to me one day and said: "I'd like to visit the white man's land. I think I might as your Nalegaq (leader) choose men and gather much meat for the voyage. But we have no wood and such a boat as I might build with lashed bone and sewn skins must founder in the great seas you tell me of. Is it not so Kablunak?" . . . . Such is the tragedy of living a thousand miles beyond the tree line.
But .there was nothing tragic in the happiness we saw that brilliant arctic morning we left North Star Bay. We had shipped two men and of necessity had included their dogs and women and children. They were all children though in their rapture. Some lay flat upon the grating of the engine room hatch and gasped in fearful joy while the Great Spirit of our engine thumped and wheezed away at his work. Others in continual peril of falling overboard craned their necks over the taffrail for a glimpse of the ship's strange green tail which swished round and round untiringly while the Kablunaks filled its hot belly with coal.
With the help of .the natives aboard we found four other camps of from one to five families each. We had no time to anchor but dropped our boats and canvassed dogs and men for the kind we desired, instantly they were named, father and mother and children would knock down their tents, gather What rotten meat they had on hand and pile aboard.
No hunter has less than a dozen dogs and many have several teams, counting the puppies. These must be driven snarling and yelping into the boats and hoisted bodily aboard, a struggling, shrieking mass of fur and bloody fangs. I don't believe the average tenderfoot could distinguish between an Eskimo team and. a pack of arctic .wolves fresh from the kill. We fenced off a pen amidships but soon found that the hundred dogs could fully command the cargo well which ran between forecastle and poop on the main deck. No one but Eskimo drivers dared enter this area. The furious pack set upon anyone who came within reach unarmed. I don't know why they were in such a vile humor, but they grew steadily worse and set going a continuous battle-royal among themselves, which for a time threatened to exterminate all except a few king dogs. After a day or so the helmsman going on watch learned that he must either go down through the fire find engine rooms in order to reach his station at the wheel or else climb the foremast shrouds and slide to safety down a main backstay. The cook demanded an escort which was enlisted from our Eskimo boys who thoroughly enjoyed the white man's timidity.
By the time we reached Cape Alexander the Erik looked like a scare-crow and smelled like Swift & Company's fertilizer plant on a July afternoon. Rigging, skids, sails and decks, were filled with a vast conglomeration of skin kayaks and tupiks, harpoons and lines, dog harnesses, sledges, furs and a million other articles; including of course a considerable amount of rubbish such as broken oars, ancient mildewed sails, blubber-soaked blankets and other relics of Peary's last voyage, all of which constitutes the Eskimo's worldly wealth.
In Whale Sound we stopped several times to kill walrus. Herds of them lay basking on isolated floes in the pleasant August sunshine. Our whale boat could approach within 25 yards if the oars were muffled and sufficient care taken to cease rowing when the bull on watch raised his head. Quick work with our repeating rifles often brought down more than we could take back to the ship. However, in all our killing we endeavored to confine the slaughter to absolute necessity. Musk oxen were the most difficult to handle, for they refuse to leave their dead when brought to bay, and several times we were forced to clean out a whole herd in order to reach the several which were to save the lives of our hunger-stricken dogs. On the other hand many a time did we pass large bands of musk oxen without even disturbing them with our cameras.
We got one bear about this time near Fitz William Island. He was strolling in and out among the rocks when we sighted him, apparently looking for a shady nook in which to sleep off his recent meal; his stomach, we found later, was crammed with undigested seal meat. A boat party landed to leeward and surrounded him. He seemed very small after walrus, which weigh full grown from 1000 to 3000 pounds. He was no runt though for he measured about 10 feet in length and gave us reason to feel that with the other kills we had a fair start on our fall meat supply.
* * *
At about 75° N. the Greenland coast swings to the west forming huge Melville Bay which terminates in Cape York. Ellsemere Land opposite trends east. Together the two coasts form a long, flask of which the neck is Smith Sound and the flask Kane Basin. The latter connects with the Polar Sea through Kennedy Channel about 20 miles wide and twice as long. Polar ice and glacial bergs pour down into Kane Basin and choke the northern entrance to Smith Sound. But the earth's revolutions combined with a northerly tidal set crowd ice along west Greenland shores until the current is deflected by Melville Bay and again by Wostenholme Sound, where the crashing grinding masses are carried across and down the western side of Baffin Bay.
So it is that once clear of Cape York a vessel may cruise freely until the great jammed pack in the Upper reaches of Smith Sound is met with off Cape Sabine. Around this point swift tides carry the ice stream clear of the land but create a dangerous sector for the most powerful craft. Average pans are from 7 to 12 feet thick. When impelled by powerful current and wind they prove formidable enemies and must be met by diplomatic retreat if there seems any likelihood of a jam. The Proteus met her fate here. Colwell reported that she sank in less than 40 minutes after being crushed. Just across the way the Polaris surrendered to the pack's relentless pressure. I recollect that some wit among her crew sold her to an Eskimo for a dog team while she lay a wreck upon the floes. I suppose the native had visions of his igloo replaced by a towering edifice built from this gold mine of material. In the night a shift of wind opened her support and she went down before the eyes of her last owner. He marked the exact spot with a sealskin float and to this day his grandsons boast of the family's proprietorship, . . . . the only kind of ship they have.
The expedition prospectus had defined our course through this danger zone and on up into Flagler Fiord which, we supposed, broke out every year. Twice had Peary traversed its outer waters and more than one English expedition had steamed easily about the adjacent shores in Hayes Sound. But in all three summers I saw the place not once could a vessel have penetrated the massive bergs and pressure ice which barricaded its entrances. This lesson of the North has been cruelly learned: one season or two, or even three, are never a criterion of ice conditions in any other seasons. This mistake cost Greely the lives of 19 of his men. They steamed far north one year and concluded that Hall Basin must .be free every summer. Franklin measured his future by reports upon the past and lost two vessels with 149 men in their crews. Peary knew the truth of arctic inconsistency only after dreadful sufferings from which he escaped by the most incredible good luck. Fortunately for us we could not get in; had we done so, goodness knows when we ever should have got out again.
But we certainly tried hard enough. Time and again we slid out of trouble by inches while the ice spun on in its mad dance as though enraged by its helplessness. In the lookout barrels the captain and MacMillan took turns in conning the ship. When a fairway opened out we hastened full of hope to reconnoiter it. But always in vain. We did our best. We risked the ship am and the expedition. But fate in the guise of ice said no.
August was almost over. Every night the young ice grew thicker. The little auks were flying south. Gusts of wind from the ice cap became more persistent and carried a bitter threat of cold weather soon to come. We sought some snug hole from which we might best carry out our original plans of crossing Ellsemere Land and striking the Polar Sea at Cape Thomas Hubbard. Foulke Fiord promised easy access to Smith Sound as well as the Inland Ice which was included in our hopes. Two families of natives already lived there and vacant igloos for those whom we had enlisted solved a difficulty we had dreaded since losing some of our lumber in a gale on the way up.
It was manifestly impossible for us to provide shelter for all the natives. On the other hand we disliked to have them feel at the outset that we were incapable of proving their protectors. That in the beginning was the great lure to join our service. A ship load of food and ammunition assured every hunter we took that his babies might blink at the next spring sun over chubby well-filled cheeks. Men and women alike dread famine first and last for its effect upon their children. Yet we knew from past accounts they could not abide by our laws of physiological regularity nor could they subsist comfortably upon a white man's diet of carbohydrates. Protein gluttony was their heritage. Evil spirits might now play havoc with the ice and weather until hunting were impossible. So long as we were there no Eskimo would go hungry. They well knew this. They believed too that we should be delighted to have them live with us. But for convenience sake they took the igloos, relieving greatly our first forbodings that we might sacrifice what little comfort and seclusion we had to a winter's confinement among two score vermined oil sponges.
We established our base at Etah (the native name for Foulke Fiord) with all possible dispatch. Deep water right up to the rocks permitted us to moor alongside and disembark the greater part of our cargo over a temporary staging. We slept very little those days. Many an arctic expedition has come to grief at this critical time when the slightest turn in meteorological conditions may postpone everything indefinitely or even compel the party to seek some new refuge. Fuel and provisions must be put ashore. Fire or ice or grounding may eliminate the ship before her cargo is even on deck. Amundsen fought fire. Fiala's hut lights went out; when he opened the door to investigate, the ship to which his wires led had disappeared, swallowed up in the ice frenzy which swept suddenly in from the sea. The Advance under ice pressure fought her way wildly up the rocks as though in terror at the insane fury of the following pack. We labored with these examples in mind.
Every box, crate, case and parcel had its distinguishing mark and symbol. The symbol indicated to which department the contained article belonged: a cross meant field gear; a crescent scientific: a disc headquarters equipment; and so on. The mark was a letter initialing the particular branch of science or equipment and a number referring to lists which the head of each department held for his own portion. This marking enabled us to sort out a great number of pieces with rapidity and accuracy. Later when excavating a case in blinding drift and no other light than a hurricane lantern we appreciated the value of this system. Also since the color of symbols bore some significance upon the contents, our Eskimos quickly learned to pick out almost anything we needed.
Speaking of cases of supplies jogs my memory. At this time we were all unconscious victims of a most outrageous delusion. Not one of us was there who had not repeatedly blistered his fingers in the biting wind which howled across Provision Point, the granite ledge where we had stacked our orderly piles of casks and boxes. Jot Small proved an exacting master of the pantry. In his capacity as cook we left largely to him the choice of our menus and their integration towards a balanced diet. He issued morning orders to the one of us who stood the regular watch from midnight to 8 a. m. (We kept a watch the whole time north for taking observations, looking out for the 'dogs, and guarding against fire.) If it were a barrel of beans he desired the unfortunate watch stander must begin some hours ahead. Next came a spell of pick work, and finally a heavy iron maul or crow bar was necessary to loosen the mass of ice and crust which formed over everything and cemented it to the rocks. This task would not have been easy under any conditions; but in a violent spray of rasping drift snow and shrouded by utter darkness it became a job we dreaded more and more as time went on.
Jot was called at six. One took a set of readings at the same time. Inevitably the fire burned down meanwhile. "How do you expect I'm agoin' to do anything by thet smudge?” He had the real Cape Cod twang which Thoreau ascribed to fish diet and fog. "Where's them beans?" He never saw them even if they were in. "Why ain't you filled thet coal bucket?" his voice rising a grade on each complaint. The fact that we were supposed to be scientists and scholars never daunted him. I believe he truly delighted in ordering us about. We put up with his idiosyncrasies because he could cook. Such bread and hot cakes as he could make! We used .to dream about them on our sledge journeys. And he was resourceful. Cook books call for many things which arctic expeditions must forget ever existed. Fresh eggs and milk are fundamentals in nearly all recipes. Yet I never saw Jot stumped in all the 400 pages of the White House Cook Book.
Our satisfaction was short lived. Jot got toothache, and his long patrols on the weather side of Cape Cod had laid the foundation of a rheumatic old age which in the polar north needs but the barest hint to ravage a man's happiness. In his little board bunk he groaned. His tobacco supply fell to half of what he was accustomed to. He went down into his chest and brought out his contract and studied it over all one evening. Next morning he announced that he was done with cooking. "I ain't agoin' to cook any more 'n my share. 'Tain't in the contract!" he declared. For two weeks we took turns arguing with him. But he hadn't sat around a life saving station stove for nine years for nothing. We never convinced him. After that he did one-seventh of the cooking and not one flapjack more.
By October we were pretty well settled so far as living quarters were concerned. The little shack we had built on the beach was a great success. From the Eskimos we learned what winds, to expect and frequent northeast gales proved their information correct. On the weather sides we piled all our empty crates and rubbish of every sort. In the space of a few days a huge drift had formed which was not only an efficient buffer against the violent attacks of fall storms but also an excellent insulator in conserving the heat of our precious coal. The walls were a double thickness of tongued spruce with a 4-inch air space between and the whole covered by rubberoid roofing material. The structure was low and solid and well designed to meet the fierce onslaughts of the violent winter gales.
Up to this point all hands had combined. Building, storing provisions, unpacking and arranging equipment, and all the other details of establishing a base had engaged the attention of us all. The work now divided itself into three parts, all preparatory to the winter's campaign. First in importance was our corps of assistants. Already we had enough drivers and hunters for preliminary parties. But for the main expedition across Ellsemere Land and north we must hire about 20 Eskimos and by short sledge journeys under the command of white leaders acquaint them with our methods and routine of travelling.
With this in view MacMillan left us as soon as possible to make a complete round of the tribe in order to choose additional men and promote a friendly spirit toward our expedition. When one considers that more than 600 miles of glacial coast must be scoured for igloos the magnitude of his task is apparent. He carried on his sledges some small presents and other substantial inducements to further intercourse with us. We had a large supply of kerosene and plenty of small single and double burner stoves. These were a great boon to the natives. Ordinarily they must camp after a hard day of hunting and travelling without any prospect of hot food for several hours. A snow house takes an hour to build and the primitive blubber lamps twice as long again before even water could be boiled. With a tin of kerosene and one of our two-burners tea and meat could be prepared in the shelter of a snow-block wind-break at half an hour's notice.
News soon got about that we were inmmensely wealthy and infinitely generous. Visitors began to arrive in the October moon. "Komotik coming" was quickly caught by the youngsters, and scarcely a day passed by without a screaming chorus of joy culminating in the "Komotik coming " cry. This business became a little embarrassing as time went on and our "open house" became better and better advertised. Some came out of pure curiosity; but most of them included mercenary motives which were never very deeply concealed. All brought skin, lines, dogs and meat until our storeroom could hold no more. One man was so delighted with the sweets and bright cloth we paid him for his dogs that he sold them all and then naively asked us to loan him several of them in order that he might return to his own home.
At MacMillan's suggestion each white man formed particular friendships among the visitors, in order that those of us who should travel might live for a time in native style and assimilate so far as possible the habit's and tricks of Eskimo life. Our system involved a deliberate descent to primitive existence for the purpose of mastering such arts as dog driving and building snow houses.
Sipsu took my fancy from the start. He was stocky and lithe, reserved but alert; and clever beyond many of them older than himself. Four children, a wife and a mother-in-law depended for their living upon his skill with harpoon and lance. He taught me to build a snow house and start a native lamp with moss and blubber. He explained how one must trail and meet a bear, first in his autumnal satiety, and last in the fierce bloodthirstiness of his spring famine. By watching Sipsu I came to understand the care of my feet—vastly important in the bitter nights and the long marches. I observed his dog discipline, and practiced my whip stroke in imitation of his own. Detail by detail I mastered the unwritten lessons which every Eskimo boy must learn before he dare go abroad amid the treacheries of cold and wind and darkness.
Each white man took his course. It was not easy; rotten meat and vermin could not go easily with ten centuries of culture. We stuck it out though and thereby bought our lives as later experience showed us. By December four of our party were fit to take the trail for serious work.
In the meantime some were always at the base. Arctic exploration is too uncertain to permit procrastination. "Do it now" became our slogan, our doctrine, our religion. Storm, tire, sickness, or any one of a dozen other disasters might as in past expeditions at any moment wipe out every particle of progress we had made. Our time was limited, our supplies were none too plentiful, and we could have employed seventy men where we had but seven.
We erected our wireless and electrical plant. The weights were a nightmare for days before we managed to get them up to the house level. Then came the labor of unpacking and assembling. Every one of the four score storage batteries, must be inspected, overhauled, repaired and connected up. After all they had undergone in shipwreck and rough handling this job, was a pretty tough one. Charging took a couple of days which were real reliefs after the struggle with engine and generator.
Allen wired the house. Incandescent lamps were strung under the close scrutiny of the Eskimos. We told them to stand by for a treat. The switch fell in. "Ah-h-h! Taku-u!" Such a shout they gave. The sun gone twenty days seemed to have returned.
"How do you imagine such a thing is possible?" we asked one old man who stood gaping.
"The little cords (wires) must be hollow," he replied, "and carry oil which becomes very hot in the glass bladders (globes)." He seemed confident he was really giving us a clue to the miracle.
After the electric lights indoor work went on with greater facility and content. It is well known that while the human being is not exactly heliotropic he is very susceptible to solar influence and possibly for the same reason unconsciously reacts when light is increased. At any rate there was a marked progress in music and repartee which are very good spirit indicators.
We fitted up a scientific workshop and put all of the recording instruments in proper working order. The thermometer shelter was anchored in an exposed position and filled with an impressive assortment of thermographs, barographs, psychometers, and every other form of mechanism designed to investigate and record the subtlest variations of our unsuspecting atmosphere. Similar substations were commissioned at commanding points on the neighboring plateau which towered over us some two thousand feet and extended several miles along the inland ice to where another station stood. This was done in order to compare meteorological data for different air movements. It was curious to note what a difference the direction of wind made. Air pouring down from the frigid wastes of the Great Ice divided above our camp into two icy torrents. One stream swept through the fiord in all its pristine bitterness. The other deflected by irregularities in the plateau fell almost vertically two thousand feet and by the increase of pressure was heated adiabatically a very merciful amount. These two conditions were consistently characteristic of all clear weather we had. Cloudy southerly weather was an equally familiar state. Swells under the ice from the open sea far to the south produced cracks among the compact floes which exhausted warm air in great volume. (The temperature of the sea never goes much below plus 29° F.) These hot jets instantly condensed all water vapor within reach and formed immense banks of black low-hanging clouds. This barrier opposed the cold northern circulation and insulated the surrounding atmosphere against loss of the water vapor heat. Warm snowy weather with little wind was the invariable result.
I need only mention the fact that the expense of time and actual suffering sacrificed to tumping heavy instruments over cliffs and glaciers in the face of blighting winds made frequent failures almost too discouraging. After the first year our ambitious program shrank to a more practicable scope, though the records themselves became little less numerous and valuable. This is an important point which we failed to understand at first: it is better to underestimate one's capacity than to overdo and disappoint co-workers whose services are willingly volunteered only so long as results seem to be in keeping with the price.
In building the house an excavation had been made beneath its forward edge. This at first was intended to be a kind of cellar; but when we realized how short of lumber we were, plans for a seismograph house were discarded and this hole substituted. A preliminary survey promised fair results provided that the place were sufficiently warmed for the tedious work of balancing pendulum and shifting grams. As master seismologist I arranged a battery of oil stoves in my dungeon and set them going full blast. I hoped to thaw the soil sufficiently to excavate down to bed rock in order that my concrete pedestal might have a proper foundation. In the meantime I walled in the space with canvas and built a work table for fixing and printing. After arduous picking I managed to dig and to take out a few boulders until I could frame my cement base. Sand and gravel I procured at the risk of my life. Every time I ventured out with the basket or box I was set upon by a million or so ravenous wolves. As their masters carried chopped meat in such a box the dogs of course thought I had come to feed them. Before the door slammed behind me hundreds of shadowy gaunt forms had leapt into life and were charging me full cry in a most terrifying manner. My shouted abuse might stop the front ranks but those in the rear only snapped and tore their way ahead in impatient rage at the delay. After several such encounters I went armed with a stout club and flanked by two Eskimo boys with whips. I even came to enjoy disappointing the ill-mannered brutes.
Meanwhile I was seized with fits of violent headaches and frequent nausea, which I attributed to eyestrain, indigestion and a number of other more obscure causes. But careful etiological examination of my indisposition pointed to the oil-stoves as the culprits; later experience proved this theory correct. In fact more than once we laid out both white men and Eskimos with the poisonous gases which collected in unventilated snow-houses and igloos while we were cooking on kerosene stoves.
Vicissitudes I call them now, all those troubles, but I have a disquieting suspicion that the designation is very weak. Scientific work in a laboratory can be a charming avocation. In a cramped and stinking hole at either freezing or boiling temperatures it is at least a bore. After some days I was ready for the seismograph. I set it up. Alas; the blue prints had given me the wrong dimensions. It was 6 inches too high for the cellar. Dynamite was necessary to alter the concrete base. Other work became more vital for the time. I postponed the nasty job until after Christmas and speak of it at all only as an illustration of the tasks we faced singlehanded under conditions that made them well nigh beyond the limits of human patience and endurance.
Four of us made ready to travel. The November moon had given us some real experience. Now we must put it to a test. Stoves and harness were repaired, skin garments were mended and refitted. Everywhere was a bustle and busyness that lasted through the 24 hours. Such is the Eskimo method. Everyone work, and when sleep can be put off no longer take it like any other rest, just settle down by the task and sleep. Heavy rifles for bear were overhauled. Ekblaw and I received orders to leave for the north with five natives. Caches for the spring campaign were our mission, bear meat for Christmas dinner our hope. We got away December 5.
(TO BE CONTINUED)