GETTING RECRUITS
When on August 1 the _Roosevelt_ steamed out from Cape York, she had on
board several Eskimo families which we had picked up there and at Salvo
Island. We also had about one hundred dogs, bought from the Eskimos.
When I say "bought," I do not mean paid for with money, as these people
have no money and no unit of value. All exchange between them is based
on the principle of pure barter. For instance, if one Eskimo has a
deerskin which he does not need, and another has something else, they
exchange. The Eskimos had dogs which we wanted, and we had many things
which they wanted, such as lumber, knives and other cutlery, cooking
utensils, ammunition, matches, et cetera. So, as the Yankees say, we
traded.
[Illustration: PEARY DISTRIBUTING UTENSILS TO WIVES OF HIS HUNTERS AT
ETAH]
Steaming in a northwesterly course from Cape York, we passed the
"Crimson Cliffs," so named by Sir John Ross, the English explorer, in
1818. This vivid name was applied to the cliffs by reason of the
quantities of "red snow" which can be seen from a ship miles out at sea.
The color is given to the permanent snow by the _Protococcus nivalis_,
one of the lowest types of the single, living protoplasmic cell. The
nearly transparent gelatinous masses vary from a quarter inch in
diameter to the size of a pin-head, and they draw from the snow and the
air the scanty nourishment which they require. Seen from a distance, the
snow looks like blood. This red banner of the Arctic has greeted me on
all my northern journeys.
Sailing by these cliffs, which extend for thirty or forty miles, my
thoughts were busy with the work before us. First and most necessary of
all was the task of gathering our arctic personnel of Eskimos and dogs,
already begun before we left Cape York.
Our next stop, after Cape York, was on August 3, at North Star Bay,
Oomunnui, as the natives call it, on Wolstenholm Sound. Here I found the
_Erik_, which had become separated from us in Davis Strait several days
before during heavy weather. At Oomunnui we took on two or three
families of Eskimos and more dogs. Ooqueah, one of my North Pole party,
came aboard at this place; Seegloo had joined us at Cape York.
On the night of August 5, a clear and sunshiny night, between Hakluyt
and Northumberland Islands I left the _Roosevelt_ and transferred to the
_Erik_, taking Matt Henson with me, for a reconnaissance of the various
Eskimo settlements on Inglefield Gulf and along the coast. This detour
was for the purpose of picking up more Eskimos and dogs. The _Roosevelt_
was sent ahead to Etah, to get in shape for her coming battle royal with
the ice in Kane Basin and the channels beyond.
There was for me a strange mingling of pleasure and sadness in this
gathering together of our brown-skinned helpers, for I felt that it was
for the last time. The business consumed several days. I went first to
Karnah, on the Redcliffe Peninsula, thence to Kangerdlooksoah and
Nunatoksoah, near the head of the gulf. Returning on our course, we came
back to Karnah, then went south to the neighborhood of the Itiblu
Glacier, then northwest again by a devious course around the islands and
the points to Kookan, in Robertson Bay, then to Nerke, on C. Saumarez,
then on to Etah, where we joined the _Roosevelt_, having obtained all
the Eskimos and dogs we needed,--two hundred and forty-six of the
latter, to be exact.
There was no intention of taking to the far North all the Eskimos taken
aboard the _Erik_ and the _Roosevelt_--only the best of them. But if any
family wanted transportation from one settlement to another, we were
glad to accommodate them. It is to be doubted if anywhere on the waters
of the Seven Seas there was ever a more outlandishly picturesque vessel
than ours at this time--a sort of free tourist steamship for traveling
Eskimos, with their chattering children, barking dogs, and other goods
and chattels.
[Illustration: ESKIMO DOGS OF THE EXPEDITION (246 IN ALL) ON SMALL
ISLAND, ETAH FJORD]
Imagine this man-and-dog-bestrewn ship, on a pleasant, windless summer
day in Whale Sound. The listless sea and the overarching sky are a vivid
blue in the sunlight--more like a scene in the Bay of Naples than one in
the Arctic. There is a crystalline clearness in the pure atmosphere that
gives to all colors a brilliancy seen nowhere else--the glittering white
of the icebergs with the blue veins running through them; the deep reds,
warm grays, and rich browns of the cliffs, streaked here and there with
the yellows of the sandstone; a little farther away sometimes the
soft green grass of this little arctic oasis; and on the distant horizon
the steel-blue of the great inland ice. When the little auks fly high
against the sunlit sky, they appear like the leaves of a forest when the
early frost has touched them and the first gale of autumn carries them
away, circling, drifting, eddying through the air. The desert of
northern Africa may be as beautiful as Hichens tells us; the jungles of
Asia may wear as vivid coloring; but to my eyes there is nothing so
beautiful as the glittering Arctic on a sunlit summer day.
On August 11 the _Erik_ reached Etah, where the _Roosevelt_ was awaiting
her. The dogs were landed on an island, the _Roosevelt_ was washed, the
boilers were blown down and filled with fresh water, the furnaces
cleaned, and the cargo overhauled and re-stowed to put the vessel in
fighting trim for her coming encounter with the ice. About three hundred
tons of coal were transferred from the _Erik_ to the _Roosevelt_, and
about fifty tons of walrus and whale meat.
Fifty tons of coal were cached at Etah for the _Roosevelt's_ expected
return the following year. Two men, boatswain Murphy and Pritchard, the
cabin boy, with full provisions for two years, were left in charge.
Harry Whitney, a summer passenger on the _Erik_, who was ambitious to
obtain musk-oxen and polar bears, asked permission to remain with my two
men at Etah. The permission was granted, and Mr. Whitney's belongings
were landed.
At Etah, Rudolph Franke, who had come north with Dr. Cook in 1907, came
to me and asked permission to go home on the _Erik_. He showed me a
letter from Dr. Cook directing him to go home this season on a whaler.
An examination by Dr. Goodsell, my surgeon, showed that the man suffered
from incipient scurvy, and that he was in a serious mental state, so I
had no alternative but to give him passage home on the _Erik_. Boatswain
Murphy, whom I was to leave at Etah, was a thoroughly trustworthy man,
and I gave him instructions to prevent the Eskimos from looting the
supplies and equipment left there by Dr. Cook, and to be prepared to
render Dr. Cook any assistance he might require when he returned, as I
had no doubt he would as soon as the ice froze over Smith Sound
(presumably in January) so as to enable him to cross to Anoratok from
Ellesmere Land, where I had no doubt he then was.
On the _Erik_ were three other passengers, Mr. C. C. Crafts, who had
come north to take a series of magnetic observations for the department
of terrestrial magnetism of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, Mr.
George S. Norton, of New York, and Mr. Walter A. Larned, the tennis
champion. The _Roosevelt's_ carpenter, Bob Bartlett, of Newfoundland
(not related to Captain Bob Bartlett), and a sailor named Johnson also
went back on the _Erik_. That vessel was commanded by Captain Sam
Bartlett (Captain Bob's uncle), who had been master of my own ship on
several expeditions.
At Etah we took on a few more Eskimos, including Ootah and Egingwah, who
were destined to be with me at the Pole; and I left there all the
remaining Eskimos that I did not wish to take with me to winter quarters
in the North. We retained forty-nine--twenty-two men, seventeen women,
ten children--and two hundred and forty-six dogs. The _Roosevelt_, as
usual, was loaded almost to the water's edge with the coal that had been
crowded into her, the seventy tons of whale meat which we had bought in
Labrador, and the meat and blubber of nearly fifty walruses.
We parted company from the _Erik_ and steamed north on the 18th of
August, an intensely disagreeable day, with driving snow and rain, and a
cutting wind from the southeast which made the sea very rough. As the
two ships separated, they signaled "good-by and good luck" with the
whistles, and our last link with civilization was broken.
Since my return I have been asked if I did not feel deep emotion on
parting with my companions on the _Erik_, and I have truthfully replied
that I did not. The reader must remember that this was my eighth
expedition into the Arctic, and that I had parted from a supply ship
many times before. Constant repetition will take the edge from the most
dramatic experience. As we steamed north from the harbor of Etah, my
thoughts were on the condition of the ice in Robeson Channel; and the
ice in Robeson Channel is more dramatic than any parting--save from
one's nearest and dearest, and I had left mine three thousand miles
below at Sydney. We had some three hundred and fifty miles of almost
solid ice to negotiate before we could reach our hoped-for winter
quarters at Cape Sheridan. I knew that beyond Smith Sound we might have
to make our slow way rod by rod, and sometimes literally inch by inch,
butting and ramming and dodging the mountainous ice; that, if the
_Roosevelt_ survived, I should probably not have my clothes off, or be
able to snatch more than an hour or two of sleep at a time, for two or
three weeks. Should we lose our ship and have to make our way over the
ice southward from anywhere below Lady Franklin Bay, or possibly beyond
there--it was good-by to my life's dream and probably to some of my
companions.