THROUGH THE PRESSURE RIDGE
At dawn the next morning, February 28, leaving at this sixth camp
some cases of biscuits, with alcohol and coal oil, we started again
landward, going over the trail made by the advance party. At one P.
M. we came up with them. They were halted by a huge conglomeration of
raftered ice tossed up by the storm which had delayed us at Shipwreck
Camp. The rafters were from twenty-five to a hundred feet high and ran
directly across our path, parallel to the land, and extending in either
direction as far as the eye could reach. Viewed from an ice pinnacle
high enough to give a clear sight across in the direction of the land
the mass of broken ice looked to be at least three miles wide. To get
around it was clearly out of the question; an attempt to do so might
lead us no one knew whither. Clearly it was a case for hard labor, to
build a road across it practicable for sledging; I had seen similar
apparently impassible ice on our polar trips but never anything worse.
At three o’clock, therefore, I told all hands to set to work building
igloos and said that to-morrow we would begin with pickaxes to make a
road across the rafters. While they were building the igloos I made a
reconnaissance ahead for some distance, returning about dark. We had
no thermometer, so that we could not tell the exact temperature, but
from the condition of the coal oil, which was very thick and viscid,
it must have been between forty-five and fifty-five below zero. It was
excellent weather for sledging, fine, clear and calm, if the going had
only been good.
March 1, at daylight, I sent back Chafe and Mamen, with an empty
sledge and ten dogs, to bring up all the oil, biscuit and alcohol that
remained at the sixth camp. They returned with a well-laden sledge,
late in the afternoon. I discovered during the day that Malloch and
Maurer had frozen their feet, a thing which caused them a good deal
of suffering and me a good deal of anxiety. Men with frozen feet are
seriously handicapped and make the progress of all difficult until they
recover. Fortunately in the present instance the men made known their
predicament soon enough to be relieved before dangerously frost-bitten.
At daylight the next morning I sent McKinlay, Hadley and Chafe back
over the trail again, to go clear through to Shipwreck Camp with an
empty sledge and fourteen dogs. They were to bring back the Peary
sledge that we had left there and full loads of pemmican, biscuit and
tea.
Our work at road-making which we had begun the day before, was
progressing steadily. It was cold, seemingly endless labor, for almost
every foot of the trail had to be hewn out of the ice to make a path
three or four feet wide, smoothed off enough to permit our sledges
to be drawn over it without being smashed. By three o’clock in the
afternoon we had got over the first big chain of ridges and on to a
small level floe. We were still far from the other side of the great
rafters but by working diligently could feel that we had accomplished
something at last. We worked on a little too long before starting back
to camp and darkness was almost upon us. So I asked the cook to go back
to camp while the rest of us were finishing our day’s work and tell
Keruk and Malloch and Maurer that we were coming and wanted to have
hot tea ready for us as soon as we got back. Malloch and Maurer had
been compelled by their frozen feet to rest for the time being, though
they insisted that they be allowed to do their share of the work and I
almost had to use force to keep them quiet.
The rest of us finally knocked off work and made our way back over
the rather tortuous road but when we reached camp no preparations
had been made to give us our much-needed tea and on inquiry I found
that Templeman had not turned up. It was now almost dark and I was a
good deal concerned about his absence, for though a splendid cook and
as willing a worker as a man could be, he was not strong enough to
withstand for very long the hardships that would surround him if he
were lost on the ice. I set out to look for him and we fired off guns
and shouted and altogether made all the noise we could to attract his
attention. Finally to my great relief I saw him floundering through
the snow on a big floe about a quarter of a mile from the camp. My
revulsion of feeling was like that of an anxious parent who thinks his
youngster has gone off and got lost and then discovers him making his
way homeward. In the parable the prodigal son receives the fatted calf;
in practice I fear that most errant youngsters receive a sound spanking
and perhaps do not suspect until years later that this disguises
a tremendous feeling of joy, which expresses itself perversely in
punishment for recklessness and warnings “never to do it again.” So
when I espied poor Templeman my first impulse was to berate him soundly
for wandering from the narrow, though none too straight, path back
to camp but when I got near enough to see that he was wading through
snow, into which he sank to the waist at every step, and had had the
good sense to keep his pickaxe with him, though he was by this time
barely able to carry it, my heart smote me and I relented. Templeman
said he was sorry he had gone astray but that he had really wanted to
do a little scouting by himself. That is the worst temptation in the
Arctic; when you send a man out by himself he may go astray and when he
realizes that he has lost his way, instead of attempting to retrace his
steps, he continues on. I was delighted to see Templeman and to know
that he was safely with us again.
At daylight the next morning the chief engineer and I began sledging
supplies over the road already built from the camp to the level floe
in the midst of the rafters. The rest of the party continued the
road-building beyond the floe. We made three trips, with two sledges
and eight dogs, and made a good beginning at the transportation of our
supplies on the way towards land. We saw several bear tracks and some
seal holes in the ice. I sent Kerdrillo and Kataktovick on through the
rafters, to report on ice conditions; they found that the going got
better as they got further across the rafters which, where we were
working, were like a small mountain range. Building a road across them
was like making the Overland Trail through the Rockies.
I have always regretted that I took no photographs here but somehow
when the light was good enough and I had the time, my camera would be
back in camp and when I had my camera with me we would be on the march
and I had no time to play photographer. Taking pictures was no sinecure
on this trip, anyway, because the cold seemed to affect the shutter
and the unrolling of the films. If George Borup had been with us as
he was with Peary on our North Pole trip, what a great collection of
photographs he could have taken!
March 4, at about four P. M., we finished working through the rafter
and came out on the smoother ice on its landward side. Mamen,
Kataktovick and I spent the day sledging supplies across from the camp
on the farther side and when the road was finished we all went back
for the last load. It was not until eight P. M. that we had all our
supplies at the new camp and we had to do the last of the work in the
dark; the Eskimo had built three igloos while we were sledging. It
had taken us four days to get across a distance of three miles. From
the shore side it was easy to see the basis of the formation of such
rafters. A storm causes the moving ice to smash against and slide over
the still ice and the pressure of the “irresistible force meeting the
immovable body” throws the ice into fantastic, mountainous formations
that are as weird as that astounding picture of Chaos before the
Creation that used to ornament the first volume of Ridpath’s “History
of the World.”
At daylight on March 5 I sent Munro and a party back across the three
miles of raftered ice to meet the McKinlay party who were about due
back from Shipwreck Camp. Munro and the others could guide and help
them across the difficult road we had made. While they were gone I took
Kataktovick and laid out a trail towards the land for the next day’s
march. Now for the first time since we left Shipwreck Camp, we got a
view of Wrangell Island; it was high and we seemed almost under it. The
air was exceptionally clear and the land looked close to us.
Munro and his party did not get back until long after dark. They had
reached our last camp across the raftered ice and not finding McKinlay
and the others there had continued on the back trail, hoping to meet
them. They went on as far as they could go without being compelled
to stay out all night, and then came back, because they had no
sleeping-robes and would have had a poor night of it, besides being
obliged to build an igloo. They were wise in knowing when they had gone
far enough; Munro showed his usual good judgment.
Our progress in to the island was retarded by the necessity of keeping
along with us as large a quantity of supplies as possible. This
meant relaying supplies, because the going was bad and made sledging
difficult, with the small number of dogs we had. On the sixth, as soon
as the first streak of light appeared, I sent Munro and his party
back again to meet the McKinlay party, while I took Kataktovick and
Kerdrillo and went ahead towards the island, road-making with our
pickaxes. Munro had told me that when he first saw the three-mile belt
of raftered ice, he never thought for a moment that we should ever get
through it. Any novice certainly had a right to feel discouraged; it
was as tough a job as I ever tackled. We now picked our way—I might
almost say pick-axed our way—across the ice from our last camp for a
distance of seven miles until we came to a large, heavy floe, which
would make a good place for a new camp; here we threw off the light
loads which we had brought on two of the Peary sledges and returned to
camp. At half past four the McKinlay party came in, convoyed by Munro
and his party. McKinlay and his companions had gone clear back to
Shipwreck Camp and brought in six cases of dog pemmican, sixteen cases
of Hudson’s Bay pemmican, thirty gallons of gasoline, and some hatchets
and snow-knives. They had left at the first camp from Shipwreck Camp
four cases of Underwood dog pemmican and ten tins of Hudson’s Bay
pemmican, for they already had too heavy loads to bring them.
They said that the day before, as the darkness was coming on, they had
come to the conclusion that they would be unable to reach the big camp
near the raftered ice before night, so they had decided to stop where
they were and build an igloo, while there was still light enough to
see. They were busily at work, cutting out snow-blocks and piling them
up, when suddenly three bears came upon them, evidently the same ones
whose tracks we had seen on our march. One of the bears got between
them and the sledge which bore their rifles. They made noise enough,
however, to frighten this bear and start all three running away; then
they sprang for their rifles and shot the bears on the run.
The next morning, therefore, I sent McKinlay, Hadley and Mamen back
to bring up the bear meat. The rest of us sledged supplies along
the shoreward way, Kataktovick and I walking on ahead to blaze the
trail. We had a continuation of the fine weather and low temperature.
I suppose it was about forty or fifty below zero. We sledged a good
part of the supplies along to the new camp on the big floe and built
igloos there. The next day we continued the work, Kataktovick picking
the trail. At first it was rough going but after a time it became a
little better and we moved all our supplies ten miles nearer the land,
returning to the igloos on the big floe for the night. We found that
at one of the temporary caches along the way two bears had destroyed a
case of coal oil and scattered two tins of biscuit over the ice.
It was hard luck, after getting the oil so near the island, to have
bears to contend with in addition to the elements, especially as our
dogs were not trained to follow a bear, so that there was no use trying
to go after them. A polar bear has a very acute sense of smell and can
scent a human being in plenty of time to get away from him, and as a
bear can go faster than a man it can escape easily, unless the hunter
has dogs trained from puppy-hood to follow a bear and round him up,
the way the dogs of Greenland can do. Of the bears that the McKinlay
party shot the meat was simply cut off the bones, to have no useless
weight to carry and some of it was cached on the ice, with the skins,
and the rest brought with us. We expected to be able to get it later on
but never did because we did not go back over the trail again, and we
expected to get more bears on our way to the island.
On the tenth we kept up the task of sledging the supplies forward. We
worked from daylight to dark, some with pickaxes, others with sledges
with light loads, for the going was rough. The Eskimo built the igloos
and by night we had all our supplies up, Munro, Mamen and myself
getting in with the last load just at dark.
The going was bad nearly all the way along here. Kataktovick and I
were off at the first crack of dawn picking the trail for the others
to follow with their pickaxes and their lightly loaded sledges. It was
necessary for us to make fairly good loads, for a white man can not
handle a sledge as deftly as an Eskimo can and we had not enough Eskimo
to drive all the sledges even if they had been free from the work of
trail-making and building igloos.
We made about seven miles during the day. Sometimes we had to get the
sledges up on a ridge fifty feet high with an almost sheer drop on the
other side. When we came to such rough places we would harness all the
dogs to a sledge and all of us who could get a hand on it would help
push the sledge. When we got the sledge up to the top we would run a
rope from it to another sledge down below and as the first sledge went
down the other side it would pull the second sledge up.