IN WINTER QUARTERS
We made another change in our routine October 28, going on to a
schedule of two meals a day, breakfast at nine o’clock and dinner at
half-past four. Tea could be obtained at one o’clock and at night,
before going to bed, any one could have tea or coffee or chocolate.
From six o’clock at night to six the next morning whoever was assigned
for that night to be watchman was on his rounds, looking after the
fires and lights and keeping the water from freezing in the water-tank.
All lights except the watchman’s lantern were out at mid-night. At six
o’clock he would wake the cook, who slept in a room off the galley,
and after waiting to have his breakfast would turn in, a day watchman
taking his place from 6 A. M. to 6 P. M.
For breakfast we always had oatmeal porridge, with condensed milk.
This was followed by various things, for we tried to make the menu
interesting. We would have eggs, ham, bacon, codfish, sausages, and
of course coffee. For dinner we would have canned oysters or clams,
shredded codfish from Newfoundland, potatoes (desiccated and frozen,
to be thawed out as we wanted to use them), carrots, parsnips, spinach,
pickles, asparagus, beans, corn, tomatoes. 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. This
consisted of sewing canvas, making clothing, sewing pemmican up in
canvas, shifting boxes and putting things over on the big floe,
shovelling snow, filling up the locker with coal, bringing in
fresh-water ice for melting in the tank, doing various odd jobs around
the ship and fixing up the dredge-hole.
We had plenty of soap and razors and plenty of underclothing, so we
kept clean. We made it a rule to shave at least three times a week
and to bathe at least once. Even the Eskimo bathed like the rest of
us. When Kataktovick joined us he said, “I like my bath.” In Nome and
St. Michael’s the Eskimo have a bath-house where they can bathe by
paying twenty-five cents and they patronize it freely. We had several
bath-tubs on the _Karluk_.
On the twenty-seventh, too, we blew down the boiler, drew the water
off, disconnected the engines and blew all the water out of the pipes.
At eight o’clock on the evening of the twenty-eighth we were gathered
in the saloon, some of us reading, some playing chess, others playing
cards, when we were alarmed by a loud report coming from the direction
of the bow. In an instant, with practically no interval, we heard
another report, from the port quarter. The watchman came in and said
there was a crack in the ice at the stem of the ship. I went out and
with our lantern we could see what had happened. The ice had cracked at
the bow and again about fifty yards away on the port quarter and the
ice had opened up for about two feet running in a westerly direction
on the port bow. The dogs were separated from the ship by the crack.
We made haste to get them on board, together with skin-boats, sledges
and sounding-machines, for we were afraid the ice might break up all
around the ship. I stayed up all night and had every one standing
by for trouble, but again nothing happened, and next morning with a
high wind blowing the drifting snow along the surface of the ice and
a temperature of twenty-four degrees below zero, we found that the
cracks had closed up again. Twice during the day the ice opened again
but closed up at once. These cracks were only an inch or two in width.
November began with a renewed violence of the gale and we drifted
to the northwest. For the first time we pumped out the hold with a
hand-pump in the engine-room. As long as we had steam up we did the
pumping with steam from the boiler but now that the boiler was blown
down we pumped by hand on deck, but that was a difficult job on account
of the cold, so by having a stove in the engine-room which kept the
temperature above freezing we found that we could handle the pump to
better advantage there.
We built an observatory for Malloch by covering in the bridge with
boards and sails with an opening at the top. Malloch had his transit
here and was untiring in his efforts to get our position. He relieved
me of much of the labor of taking the observations and was a great help
throughout. In the afternoon of this first of November we had clear
weather for a short time and were treated to a remarkable display of
the aurora, one of the few that we had in all our months of drifting
and ice travel. During the gale that kept up all day we dragged our
dredge and parted the line, so that we had to put on a new dredge. The
next day we got specimens of several species, including a number of
different kinds of starfish. Our soundings showed that we were drifting
in comparatively shallow waters shoaling to 105 fathoms on the first
and to 36 on the second. Mr. Hadley and I busied ourselves scraping
deerskins, a necessary preliminary to their use in making clothing; the
scraping is done to break the vellum, to loosen them up, for when they
are hard they do not keep you so warm.
November 4 we found another new animal in the dredge. The soundings now
gave us only 28 fathoms. The wind fluctuated in violence all day long,
finally settling down to a good-sized gale, with drifting snow. On the
seventh open water appeared about two miles from the ship. The Eskimo
went out and shot ten seal. I was with them and we saw many more seal
out in the water but they were too far away for us.
November 10 was an unusually beautiful day. There was a fresh south
wind and the temperature went up to twenty-three degrees above zero;
it was almost like a spring day. About three miles from the ship the
Eskimo shot six seal. They also got the first bear of our drift, a
young one three or four years old, about six feet long, with a good
coat. They had been on the lookout for bear, on account of the amount
of seal meat they had left on the ice. I intended to give the skin of
this bear to the Boston City Club for its new club-house but we needed
it and had to use it for trousers and mittens. Everybody was still
wearing American clothes at this time, with deerskin boots.
We had the deck covered with snow about two feet deep to make the ship
warm; when the top of the snow became dirty we took off a few inches
and replaced it with clean snow. The outside of the ship was banked up
and we built a kind of runway from the deck to the ice with walls made
of blocks of snow. This made our passage between the ship and the ice
easy.
November 11 the sun left us for good; we were now to be without it
throughout the twenty-four hours for seventy-one days.
The young Eskimo widower, Kataktovick, came to me the next day and
asked me for a fountain pen, to write letters to his Eskimo friends, I
presume. Some weeks before he had asked me for a book to read; after a
fortnight he brought it back, said that he had read it and asked for
some magazines. We had a good many and the pictures were interesting
so I let him have them gladly. On this particular day he came into
my cabin and saw me writing with a fountain pen. Kataktovick did not
ask outright for the pen but simply said that he wanted something to
write with. I offered him a pencil but he shook his head and said
that was not what he wanted. Then I asked him if the pen was what he
wanted. He said it was. I gave him one, as we had a large quantity of
fountain pens, and as I gave it to him I thought to myself: “What would
Peary say?” To live in the open as they have been accustomed to live
is in his judgment the Eskimo’s normal existence and not to become
dependent on the white man’s methods of life. We had a large supply of
blank-books on board, in which our scientists jotted down notes and
calculations to be afterwards transcribed on the typewriter, and I gave
Kataktovick some of these blank-books from time to time.
The next day we had another wonderful display of the aurora, with
brilliant moonlight, which had been lighting up the scene for several
days. For a while in the afternoon, as we drifted steadily along, we
saw a little of the sun’s upper limb. 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 saw her heading in
towards shore, and they launched a boat and went out to meet her. When
they reached the spot where she was supposed to be she was not there
and did not turn up until some ten hours later. Her apparent presence
was simply a peculiarity of the sea-horizon, a refraction or distortion.
The Eskimo reported fox tracks a few miles from the ship and I gave
them a dozen fox traps. The Arctic fox is of a clear white color, his
pelt often whiter than that of the polar bear, which sometimes verges
on the yellow. The Eskimo set the traps at various points on the ice,
fastened securely so that the foxes would not carry them away, and on
the seventeenth they caught one very small fox. Mr. Hadley finished
the second Peary sledge. We lost the dredge again on the seventeenth
and had to replace it with another one, which brought up some more
specimens new to Murray. The temperature was only nine below zero but
it was as cold as it is along the Atlantic seaboard in winter because
just now there was much open water about us, though it was a good many
miles away. On our North Pole trips we had much lower temperatures than
we were now having but felt the cold less because it remained at the
same level for weeks and was free from dampness because there were not
so many open leads.
On the nineteenth we lost the lead and tube of the Kelvin
sounding-machine; the wire kinked and broke, so we had to attach
another lead and brass tube. It was a typical Cape Sheridan day, a
magnificent morning with hardly any wind and a temperature of nineteen
below zero.
Soot had accumulated in the funnel of my cabin stove, so that the fire
would not burn, and I determined on the twentieth to adopt heroic
measures to get the soot out. The method which I finally hit upon was
effective but disturbing. I decided to pour a lot of flashlight powder
in the stove, as this would give a quick puff and blow out the soot.
I was pouring the powder in, when I inadvertently poured too fast and
got too much in. Flash! The door of the stove came off and sailed past
my head; if it had hit me it would have killed me. As it was the stove
lost its bearings and landed with a tremendous crash against the side
of the room, but no particular damage was done—except to the soot.
Murray got a little octopus in the dredge. He had been getting stones,
small pebbles at first and then larger ones, almost perfectly round
and very smooth. Now, however, he began to get specimens of previously
unknown animal life again—eleven different kinds in one day. He was
faithful and untiring in his dredging and his work, at which we all
helped, was not the kind that had the apparent zest of hunting or
exploration in it, but called for patient investigation and, always,
hard labor. It was a great pity that we were unable to save the things
his dredging brought up.
On the twenty-second my thoughts turned towards Boston and Cambridge,
for I knew that this was the day of the Harvard-Yale football game,
which I had attended so many times. I wondered who would win and as the
afternoon wore on I thought of what must be taking place on Soldiers’
Field and of the life and activity in the hotels of Boston the night
after the game.
I looked back and remembered some of the things that had happened when
I had seen games in the past and wondered when I should see another. I
recalled how I went down to New Haven the day before the game in 1910
and went into the country to the Yale headquarters and talked to the
team on our North Pole trip of the previous year to take their minds
off their troubles. And I remembered, too, how George Borup took the
news of the 1908 game when we got our mail for the first time in over
a year on our way home in the _Roosevelt_ from the North Pole trip
in the late summer of 1909. He and MacMillan occupied the same cabin
and were eagerly looking over their letters when suddenly Borup began
to cry out in tones of anguish, “Oh, dear! Oh, isn’t that terrible!
Oh, I can’t believe it’s true!” until MacMillan was sure that he had
learned of the death of some near relative. Finally when he felt that
he must ask he ventured to inquire the cause of Borup’s mourning and to
hope that he had not heard bad news. “Why, just think!” replied Borup.
“Harvard beat Yale last fall, 4 to 0!” Now, on November 22, 1913, when
the sky cleared to the south and we were treated to a red glow in that
direction to light up the darkness I wondered if anything happening in
the vicinity of Cambridge was having its effect on the meteorological
conditions.
We had reached nearly to Lat. 73 N. on November 15. This proved to be
our farthest north. After that for a month the winds drove us south
and southwest and then for the rest of our drift more nearly due west
again. We now had a little relief from the incessant sixty-mile gale
which had been making it intensely cold for a number of days and on the
twenty-fourth the red glow continuing gave us the effect of a little
twilight which enabled Malloch to read the transit in his observatory
without the aid of a lantern. The temperature was twenty below zero,
but the air was so clear and clean that one could go about out of doors
with American clothes on without discomfort. Just before midnight,
however, the thermometer began to climb and the barometer to drop,
denoting the approach of a storm, and all day long on the twenty-fifth
it was a miserable time to be out. We had our work to do, however, and
the Eskimo finished banking up the starboard side of the ship with snow
to make things as warm and comfortable as possible.
November 27 was Thanksgiving Day in the States but as we were a
Canadian expedition we made no observance of the day. My thoughts took
another backward glance to the Thanksgiving Days I had spent in Belmont
and Winchester and elsewhere, with my good friends of Boston.
The day began early with me because I was awakened from a sound sleep,
almost choking to death from the sulphurous fumes of the mess-room
stove which I found on getting out of my cabin was smoking badly.
Chafe, the mess-room steward, was making heroic efforts to get the fire
going to take the fumes off. I told him to take hold of the stove with
me and carry it out on deck, which we managed to do.