CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER III.A Haul of the Dredge—Norman Lockyer Island—Traces of an Eskimo Exodus—Midnight on 12th August—Mysterious Cairns—Forcing the Tidal Barrier—“Kane’s Open Polar Sea”—Hannah Island—Grant Land Reached—Musk Oxen—“Discovery’s” Winter Quarters.Illustrated capital letterAN anxious watch was always kept for any favourable movement of the ice. But, meanwhile, the broad smooth floe alongside afforded a tempting exercising ground, whereon, after working hours, some played football and others took their first lessons in dog-driving. The ships happened to be secured in a sort of basin fifteen fathoms deep, but with shallower water all round, so that the bottom was protected from the scrapings of icebergs. It was evidently a favourable spot for a haul of the dredge. Our expectations were more than realised. The net came up full of strange creatures. Here a fish with a sucker under his chin; there a brittle feather star with long branched arms. He has to be extracted most carefully from the bag, and supplied with some cotton to grasp before being consigned to our naturalist’s ever-ready bottle. Next comes aTerebratula, or lamp shell, anchored by a strange chance to a fossilTerebratuladrifted from some neighbouring rock. Here are pale vermilion-coloured antlers ofEscharella, and delicate lacework ofRetepore Polyzoa, and here, perhaps greatest prize of all, a little calcareous sponge with a double frill glistening like spun glass. The dredging operations were continued far into the nominal night, and, after a little necessary rest, we started to explore the island. A steep wall of ice-foot encircling the land disputed our inroad. Clambering up over it, we were at once struck with the terraced condition of the shores. On the north side of the island especially, the ridges rose one over the other in long horizontal waves to the number of twenty or more. Even on the highest, sea shells were to be picked up. Each ridge was tipped here and there with little mounds of yellow clay, sometimes in lines at right angles to the ridges. The shore was very barren; a few little grey tufts of grass, or Draba, found root in the mounds of yellow clay, all the rest was small stones weathered into sharp points like cinders.When we reached the northern shores of the island, a number of conspicuous white objects strewn along the lower terraces excited our curiosity. They were bones of walrus and seal, much broken evidently by the hand of man, but fragile and moss-grown with age. Some long-vanished tribe had doubtless found this lonely island a rich hunting-ground. The western point of the island was covered with the foundations of a complete town. In some places mere rings of stones had served to keep down the edges of summer tents of skins; in others, rectangular enclosures three yards broad, with excavated floor and with traces of porch opening seawards, gave unmistakable evidence of more permanent habitation. Deep carpets of velvety moss found rich soil in the floors of the huts, which had doubtless been no cleaner than that of modern Eskimo. A little further inland we came upon a bird-shelter, such as the natives of Danish Greenland still use to encourage geese and duck to settle on their shores. It consisted of four stones piled together like a miniature “Druid’s altar,” so asto form a chamber large enough to shelter a nest. Generations of eider duck had been hatched in it in security since the last wild hunter left the shore. When we found it, it held a deep nest of eider down with three eggs, fresh, but cold, probably belonging to a duck we had killed before landing. The traces of former human habitation found on this island, as well as at other places further northwards, seemed to be about equally ancient. All told—not of fixed habitation in these inhospitable lands, but of the exodus of some migrating tribe whose hunters must have travelled far with their dog sledges if the walrus and seal were as scarce then as now. No doubt the Arctic Highlanders who told Kane that an island rich in musk oxen lay far to the north, had occasionally despatched hunters in that direction; but no mere hunters would require such a town of huts, nor would they take the trouble to build on a new site at each visit without disturbing the circles of stone close beside them. Similar ancient remains have been found far westward through the Parry group, and have been attributed to that host which, in the fourteenth century, swept downwards from the unknown north and annihilated the Norsemen; but in our case the broken walrus and seal bones, though lichen-grown and evidently very old, could hardly have lasted five centuries even in an Arctic climate.ESKIMO TENT-CIRCLES.After three days’ detention in Franklin and Pierce Bay, the ships succeeded in creeping up inshore past Cape Prescott and a broad glacier-headed bay, which has since been called after Professor Allman. Every one was on deck as we rounded Cape Hawkes into Dobbin Bay at midnight on the 12th August, for the scene that was opening beyond the tall shadow of the cape was one of unusual splendour, altogether different from such ideas of far Northern scenery as we had gleaned from books. It has somehow or other become conventional to represent Arctic skies as dark and lowering, and Arctic day as little better than uncertain twilight. Nothing could be wider from the mark, at least during the months that travel by ship and sledge is possible. Washington Irving Island threw a long shadowtowards us across the lilac-tinted floes and gleaming water-spaces, which broke into ripples as our iron prow pushed towards them. As we rounded in close to the island, every telescope was fixed on a strange point on the top of the bluff standing out clear and sharp against the northern sunlight. It was either a very odd pinnacle of rock or a cairn, and that, too, remarkably well placed. We could soon decide, for the back of the bluff afforded a steep but practicable ascent. The conglomerate rock of the summit was smoothed off like a mosaic by the action of some ancient glacier, but near the edges it broke into a succession of rocky ledges, and on the topmost of these stood the object of our curiosity—a conical pile of well-packed stones. A second similar one stood a little lower down to the southwards, both plainly the work of a painstaking builder. But who was that builder? Not Eskimo. Structure and site forbade that suggestion. Civilised man had but once visited this shore, and that was when Dr. Hayes, in the spring of 1861, halted his tired dogs on the floes beside the island. He did not climb the bluff, and, besides, such an active sledge traveller would not have loitered to build a pair of cairns except at some crisis of his journey, and then he would have referred to them in his Journal. But the cairns themselves bore witness that they were not the work of any modern builder. Lichens grow but slowly in these regions. Dr. Scott found Sir Edward Parry’s cairn untouched by them after thirty-two years, and the wheel tracks of his cart were fresh as yesterday’s when, after the same interval, Sir Leopold M’Clintock crossed his track. These stones, on the other hand, were cemented together by deep patches of orange lichen—the growth of many generations. We found no record or scratched stone to tell us the names or fortunes of the men who had left the cairns as witnesses to us, their successors. Perhaps some baffled wanderer, whose fate is unknown to fame, had thus marked his furthest north. There is plenty of room for conjecture. Many have sailed for the northern Eldorado since Karlsefne, Celtic Norseman, left his Greenland home and launched his three ships on the first Arctic Expedition, eight hundred and seventy years ago.CAPE HAWKES.For a week after leaving the island our progress northward was a constant struggle with the pack. Here, in the broad basin opposite Humboldt glacier, the Atlantic tidal wave through Baffin’s Sea terminates, and leaves an icy barrier to mark its limits. Had not that barrier consisted of much broken floes lying off a continuous coast-line, it would have been impossible to force any ship through it; but, aided as we were by the shore, twenty-eight miles were made good in a week. Never did the prospects of the Expedition seem less cheering, but we comforted ourselves with the knowledge thatthe “Polaris,” a fortnight later in the season, had made her magnificent run into Robeson Channel without much difficulty. With constant watchfulness and unremitting labour the way northward was won mile by mile. Every hour opened up some fresh possibility of advance, or some new danger to be combated. The tired watch-keepers found little rest during their short spell below. Almost every one “turned in” without undressing. The tearing and splintering of the ice along the ship’s sides, and the creaking and crushing as she charged the floes, made sleep difficult. “All hands up screw and rudder,” became a familiar order. And twice during the week it became necessary to cut docks in the floes to shelter the ships from pressure. On the first occasion, the heavy ice-saws, swung on tripods and worked by every hand on board, did their work readily; but on the second day they were found too short to reach through the thick ice, and nothing but rapid blasting with gunpowder saved the ships from an overwhelming crush. At length we found the rising tide flowing—not from the south as it had done, but from the unknown north. It was the 19th August. The barrier was past. Pools and lanes of water became more frequent, and on the 21st we steamed through a sea which Morton, leader of Kane’s northern party, might well call open, for the ice fragments floating in its intensely green water were not numerous enough to prevent a slight swell, which gave our wardroom lamps the old familiar swing.CAIRNS ON WASHINGTON IRVING ISLAND.As we pass Cape Constitution, Kane’s furthest, the air, 6° below freezing, warns us that this year’s navigable season is already far gone, but the dazzling sunlight ahead shows but little ice save the film already forming on the sea. Twenty hours’ steam at this rate would take us beyond where ship had ever sailed. But, alas! “open seas” inside the Polar ice are disappointingly limited. Fragments of pack increase in masses, and at length stretch across the channel in a long white line from shore to shore. But a degree and a-half of latitude has been gained, and the 81° parallel lies five miles behind us as the ships are secured between Hannah Island and the grey cliffs of Bessels Bay. The island is merely a number of gravel mounds forming a convex breakwater in the entrance of the narrow fiord.Looking northward from it, Hall’s Basin lay before us, bounded on the right by Cape Morton and Joe Island, and far away beyond the mouth of Petermann Fiord the valley of Hall’s Rest and the distant headlands of “Polaris” Promontory; while to the left, at the other side of the strait, the snowy cliffs of Grant Land formed the western lintel of Robeson Channel. There was little time to explore the island. A sketch which supplies the accompanying engraving was just complete when the signal for recall flew from the foremast of H.M.S. “Alert.” A lead had opened to the north-westward; the whole of the ice was in motion, and that night both ships reached the northern shores of Lady Franklin Straits before the closing pack barred further progress.Plate III.—MUSK OX HUNT, DISCOVERY HARBOUR,Midnight, August 25, 1875—p.25.Decorative breakDrop Cap oOUR first musk ox hunt led us to an isolated hill-top overlooking the bay in which H.M.S. “Discovery” afterwards wintered. This sketch was made on the following evening, from the spot where seven of the herd had fallen. Looking southward across the bay, and beyond Bellot Island, Lady Franklin Sound extends away to the south-west; and at the other side of the sound Grinnell Land rises in a line of straight cliffs, and spreads away towards Cape Leiber on the left, and to the distant peaks of the Victoria and Albert range on the right.VIEW FROM THE TOP OF HANNAH ISLAND.It was then midnight and very calm. A well-sheltered bay shut in by Bellot Island offered a secure harbour, and both ships entered it, steaming in towards a snow-covered valley at its head. Half-a-mile inland in the valley lay a cluster of dark objects; through our telescopes they looked like boulders; but as we watched them, wondering at their uniform size, they appeared to move. In a moment there could be no mistake. They were musk oxen, eleven of them in all, and within easy reach. A hunting party of six was soon organised, and in a few minutes a boat landed us on this yet untrodden shore. We separated in three directions, meaning to cut off the retreat of the animals landwards, but, unfortunately, our left wing engaged the enemy sooner than we expected, and they made off at a rolling gallop up a steep glen; two of them, evidently wounded, turned downwards towards a ravine to the left, but the main body vanished over the brow of a hill. So many pounds of good fresh meat could not be allowed to escape without an effort, and accordingly two of us started off up hill on the track of the game. They had made almost a complete circle, and we sighted them standing together on a steep isolated bluff nearly over where we had first seen them. Hidden by a projecting edge of the hill crest, we scrambled to the top up a slope of stones and snow, and surprised the beasts not ten yards off. They galloped right and left, heads down, and sweeping the snow with their long shaggy fur, but fell fast under the quick fire of our Winchester repeating rifles—murderous weapons for this sort of work. In less than a minute all seven were stretched on the snow.It was now necessary to skin and cut up our victims, but before we commenced this verydisagreeable duty, the reports of rifles in the valley below induced us to look over the brow. Our comrades had been reinforced by others from the ships, and a circle of assailants had closed round the wounded leader of the herd—a splendid bull. He was making his last stand close to the brink of a deep ravine, gallantly facing round at the flash of each rifle. He could no longer charge, but the angry toss of his head showed how dangerous it would be to close with him. He received no less than twenty-eight heavy Snider bullets before he fell.Musk ox hunting is not, as a rule, exciting sport. The skinning and cleaning of the game, often in a cutting wind and low temperature, and the carrying of the meat on board the ship, involved a good deal of labour. Upon a subsequent occasion one of our hunters conceived the happy idea of making a wounded ox carry his own beef towards the ship, but the beast resented direction, refused even to be led by the horns, and finally overthrew his captor, and had to be despatched incontinently. They rarely attack, and can generally be approached within rifle range with little trouble. Sometimes, however, they are unaccountably timid. Animals that have never seen men are said to be devoid of fear; but our experience does not bear out the statement. Every beast we met, from the musk ox to the lemming, was afraid of us. They seemed to take some time to realise that we did not belong to their world. But having once made up their minds, they showed even more terror than wild animals usually do.Each musk ox gave us about two hundred pounds of meat, often most excellent, but occasionally tainted with the flavour that gives them their name. We failed to ascertain the source of this characteristic. It occurs in both sexes and at all ages; and, moreover, it is not peculiar to the musk ox, for a haunch of reindeer presented to us by the Governor of Egedesminde possessed the very same flavour. A long course of preserved food makes most fresh meat acceptable; walrus and seal became delicacies; owls, foxes, and even skuas are not to be despised; but genuinely musky musk ox is fit for nothing more civilised than Eskimo dogs.HEAD OF MUSK OX.According to the programme drawn up for our Expedition before we left England, the second ship was not to be carried beyond the 82° parallel of north latitude. The sheltered harbour in which the ships now lay was 81° 41´, and was in every way suited for the winter quarters of our consort. Here, accordingly, the first stage of the Expedition terminated. So far everything we had hoped for had been accomplished. Depôts to cover retreat in case of disaster had been duly deposited at the Carey Islands and at Cape Hawkes, and a suitable harbour for H.M.S. “Discovery” had been found beyond Lady Franklin Strait, in a higher northern latitude than any human being had yet wintered in. Much of the navigable season still remained, and though we had all long ago realised the absurdity of expecting open water in the Far North, we could not but look hopefully forward to the long stretch of coast line shown on the charts extending to within 6° of the Pole, interrupted only by “Army Fiord” and “Navy Opening.”

CHAPTER III.

A Haul of the Dredge—Norman Lockyer Island—Traces of an Eskimo Exodus—Midnight on 12th August—Mysterious Cairns—Forcing the Tidal Barrier—“Kane’s Open Polar Sea”—Hannah Island—Grant Land Reached—Musk Oxen—“Discovery’s” Winter Quarters.

Illustrated capital letter

AN anxious watch was always kept for any favourable movement of the ice. But, meanwhile, the broad smooth floe alongside afforded a tempting exercising ground, whereon, after working hours, some played football and others took their first lessons in dog-driving. The ships happened to be secured in a sort of basin fifteen fathoms deep, but with shallower water all round, so that the bottom was protected from the scrapings of icebergs. It was evidently a favourable spot for a haul of the dredge. Our expectations were more than realised. The net came up full of strange creatures. Here a fish with a sucker under his chin; there a brittle feather star with long branched arms. He has to be extracted most carefully from the bag, and supplied with some cotton to grasp before being consigned to our naturalist’s ever-ready bottle. Next comes aTerebratula, or lamp shell, anchored by a strange chance to a fossilTerebratuladrifted from some neighbouring rock. Here are pale vermilion-coloured antlers ofEscharella, and delicate lacework ofRetepore Polyzoa, and here, perhaps greatest prize of all, a little calcareous sponge with a double frill glistening like spun glass. The dredging operations were continued far into the nominal night, and, after a little necessary rest, we started to explore the island. A steep wall of ice-foot encircling the land disputed our inroad. Clambering up over it, we were at once struck with the terraced condition of the shores. On the north side of the island especially, the ridges rose one over the other in long horizontal waves to the number of twenty or more. Even on the highest, sea shells were to be picked up. Each ridge was tipped here and there with little mounds of yellow clay, sometimes in lines at right angles to the ridges. The shore was very barren; a few little grey tufts of grass, or Draba, found root in the mounds of yellow clay, all the rest was small stones weathered into sharp points like cinders.

When we reached the northern shores of the island, a number of conspicuous white objects strewn along the lower terraces excited our curiosity. They were bones of walrus and seal, much broken evidently by the hand of man, but fragile and moss-grown with age. Some long-vanished tribe had doubtless found this lonely island a rich hunting-ground. The western point of the island was covered with the foundations of a complete town. In some places mere rings of stones had served to keep down the edges of summer tents of skins; in others, rectangular enclosures three yards broad, with excavated floor and with traces of porch opening seawards, gave unmistakable evidence of more permanent habitation. Deep carpets of velvety moss found rich soil in the floors of the huts, which had doubtless been no cleaner than that of modern Eskimo. A little further inland we came upon a bird-shelter, such as the natives of Danish Greenland still use to encourage geese and duck to settle on their shores. It consisted of four stones piled together like a miniature “Druid’s altar,” so asto form a chamber large enough to shelter a nest. Generations of eider duck had been hatched in it in security since the last wild hunter left the shore. When we found it, it held a deep nest of eider down with three eggs, fresh, but cold, probably belonging to a duck we had killed before landing. The traces of former human habitation found on this island, as well as at other places further northwards, seemed to be about equally ancient. All told—not of fixed habitation in these inhospitable lands, but of the exodus of some migrating tribe whose hunters must have travelled far with their dog sledges if the walrus and seal were as scarce then as now. No doubt the Arctic Highlanders who told Kane that an island rich in musk oxen lay far to the north, had occasionally despatched hunters in that direction; but no mere hunters would require such a town of huts, nor would they take the trouble to build on a new site at each visit without disturbing the circles of stone close beside them. Similar ancient remains have been found far westward through the Parry group, and have been attributed to that host which, in the fourteenth century, swept downwards from the unknown north and annihilated the Norsemen; but in our case the broken walrus and seal bones, though lichen-grown and evidently very old, could hardly have lasted five centuries even in an Arctic climate.

ESKIMO TENT-CIRCLES.

After three days’ detention in Franklin and Pierce Bay, the ships succeeded in creeping up inshore past Cape Prescott and a broad glacier-headed bay, which has since been called after Professor Allman. Every one was on deck as we rounded Cape Hawkes into Dobbin Bay at midnight on the 12th August, for the scene that was opening beyond the tall shadow of the cape was one of unusual splendour, altogether different from such ideas of far Northern scenery as we had gleaned from books. It has somehow or other become conventional to represent Arctic skies as dark and lowering, and Arctic day as little better than uncertain twilight. Nothing could be wider from the mark, at least during the months that travel by ship and sledge is possible. Washington Irving Island threw a long shadowtowards us across the lilac-tinted floes and gleaming water-spaces, which broke into ripples as our iron prow pushed towards them. As we rounded in close to the island, every telescope was fixed on a strange point on the top of the bluff standing out clear and sharp against the northern sunlight. It was either a very odd pinnacle of rock or a cairn, and that, too, remarkably well placed. We could soon decide, for the back of the bluff afforded a steep but practicable ascent. The conglomerate rock of the summit was smoothed off like a mosaic by the action of some ancient glacier, but near the edges it broke into a succession of rocky ledges, and on the topmost of these stood the object of our curiosity—a conical pile of well-packed stones. A second similar one stood a little lower down to the southwards, both plainly the work of a painstaking builder. But who was that builder? Not Eskimo. Structure and site forbade that suggestion. Civilised man had but once visited this shore, and that was when Dr. Hayes, in the spring of 1861, halted his tired dogs on the floes beside the island. He did not climb the bluff, and, besides, such an active sledge traveller would not have loitered to build a pair of cairns except at some crisis of his journey, and then he would have referred to them in his Journal. But the cairns themselves bore witness that they were not the work of any modern builder. Lichens grow but slowly in these regions. Dr. Scott found Sir Edward Parry’s cairn untouched by them after thirty-two years, and the wheel tracks of his cart were fresh as yesterday’s when, after the same interval, Sir Leopold M’Clintock crossed his track. These stones, on the other hand, were cemented together by deep patches of orange lichen—the growth of many generations. We found no record or scratched stone to tell us the names or fortunes of the men who had left the cairns as witnesses to us, their successors. Perhaps some baffled wanderer, whose fate is unknown to fame, had thus marked his furthest north. There is plenty of room for conjecture. Many have sailed for the northern Eldorado since Karlsefne, Celtic Norseman, left his Greenland home and launched his three ships on the first Arctic Expedition, eight hundred and seventy years ago.

CAPE HAWKES.

For a week after leaving the island our progress northward was a constant struggle with the pack. Here, in the broad basin opposite Humboldt glacier, the Atlantic tidal wave through Baffin’s Sea terminates, and leaves an icy barrier to mark its limits. Had not that barrier consisted of much broken floes lying off a continuous coast-line, it would have been impossible to force any ship through it; but, aided as we were by the shore, twenty-eight miles were made good in a week. Never did the prospects of the Expedition seem less cheering, but we comforted ourselves with the knowledge thatthe “Polaris,” a fortnight later in the season, had made her magnificent run into Robeson Channel without much difficulty. With constant watchfulness and unremitting labour the way northward was won mile by mile. Every hour opened up some fresh possibility of advance, or some new danger to be combated. The tired watch-keepers found little rest during their short spell below. Almost every one “turned in” without undressing. The tearing and splintering of the ice along the ship’s sides, and the creaking and crushing as she charged the floes, made sleep difficult. “All hands up screw and rudder,” became a familiar order. And twice during the week it became necessary to cut docks in the floes to shelter the ships from pressure. On the first occasion, the heavy ice-saws, swung on tripods and worked by every hand on board, did their work readily; but on the second day they were found too short to reach through the thick ice, and nothing but rapid blasting with gunpowder saved the ships from an overwhelming crush. At length we found the rising tide flowing—not from the south as it had done, but from the unknown north. It was the 19th August. The barrier was past. Pools and lanes of water became more frequent, and on the 21st we steamed through a sea which Morton, leader of Kane’s northern party, might well call open, for the ice fragments floating in its intensely green water were not numerous enough to prevent a slight swell, which gave our wardroom lamps the old familiar swing.

CAIRNS ON WASHINGTON IRVING ISLAND.

As we pass Cape Constitution, Kane’s furthest, the air, 6° below freezing, warns us that this year’s navigable season is already far gone, but the dazzling sunlight ahead shows but little ice save the film already forming on the sea. Twenty hours’ steam at this rate would take us beyond where ship had ever sailed. But, alas! “open seas” inside the Polar ice are disappointingly limited. Fragments of pack increase in masses, and at length stretch across the channel in a long white line from shore to shore. But a degree and a-half of latitude has been gained, and the 81° parallel lies five miles behind us as the ships are secured between Hannah Island and the grey cliffs of Bessels Bay. The island is merely a number of gravel mounds forming a convex breakwater in the entrance of the narrow fiord.Looking northward from it, Hall’s Basin lay before us, bounded on the right by Cape Morton and Joe Island, and far away beyond the mouth of Petermann Fiord the valley of Hall’s Rest and the distant headlands of “Polaris” Promontory; while to the left, at the other side of the strait, the snowy cliffs of Grant Land formed the western lintel of Robeson Channel. There was little time to explore the island. A sketch which supplies the accompanying engraving was just complete when the signal for recall flew from the foremast of H.M.S. “Alert.” A lead had opened to the north-westward; the whole of the ice was in motion, and that night both ships reached the northern shores of Lady Franklin Straits before the closing pack barred further progress.

Plate III.—MUSK OX HUNT, DISCOVERY HARBOUR,Midnight, August 25, 1875—p.25.

Decorative break

Drop Cap oOUR first musk ox hunt led us to an isolated hill-top overlooking the bay in which H.M.S. “Discovery” afterwards wintered. This sketch was made on the following evening, from the spot where seven of the herd had fallen. Looking southward across the bay, and beyond Bellot Island, Lady Franklin Sound extends away to the south-west; and at the other side of the sound Grinnell Land rises in a line of straight cliffs, and spreads away towards Cape Leiber on the left, and to the distant peaks of the Victoria and Albert range on the right.

Drop Cap o

OUR first musk ox hunt led us to an isolated hill-top overlooking the bay in which H.M.S. “Discovery” afterwards wintered. This sketch was made on the following evening, from the spot where seven of the herd had fallen. Looking southward across the bay, and beyond Bellot Island, Lady Franklin Sound extends away to the south-west; and at the other side of the sound Grinnell Land rises in a line of straight cliffs, and spreads away towards Cape Leiber on the left, and to the distant peaks of the Victoria and Albert range on the right.

VIEW FROM THE TOP OF HANNAH ISLAND.

It was then midnight and very calm. A well-sheltered bay shut in by Bellot Island offered a secure harbour, and both ships entered it, steaming in towards a snow-covered valley at its head. Half-a-mile inland in the valley lay a cluster of dark objects; through our telescopes they looked like boulders; but as we watched them, wondering at their uniform size, they appeared to move. In a moment there could be no mistake. They were musk oxen, eleven of them in all, and within easy reach. A hunting party of six was soon organised, and in a few minutes a boat landed us on this yet untrodden shore. We separated in three directions, meaning to cut off the retreat of the animals landwards, but, unfortunately, our left wing engaged the enemy sooner than we expected, and they made off at a rolling gallop up a steep glen; two of them, evidently wounded, turned downwards towards a ravine to the left, but the main body vanished over the brow of a hill. So many pounds of good fresh meat could not be allowed to escape without an effort, and accordingly two of us started off up hill on the track of the game. They had made almost a complete circle, and we sighted them standing together on a steep isolated bluff nearly over where we had first seen them. Hidden by a projecting edge of the hill crest, we scrambled to the top up a slope of stones and snow, and surprised the beasts not ten yards off. They galloped right and left, heads down, and sweeping the snow with their long shaggy fur, but fell fast under the quick fire of our Winchester repeating rifles—murderous weapons for this sort of work. In less than a minute all seven were stretched on the snow.

It was now necessary to skin and cut up our victims, but before we commenced this verydisagreeable duty, the reports of rifles in the valley below induced us to look over the brow. Our comrades had been reinforced by others from the ships, and a circle of assailants had closed round the wounded leader of the herd—a splendid bull. He was making his last stand close to the brink of a deep ravine, gallantly facing round at the flash of each rifle. He could no longer charge, but the angry toss of his head showed how dangerous it would be to close with him. He received no less than twenty-eight heavy Snider bullets before he fell.

Musk ox hunting is not, as a rule, exciting sport. The skinning and cleaning of the game, often in a cutting wind and low temperature, and the carrying of the meat on board the ship, involved a good deal of labour. Upon a subsequent occasion one of our hunters conceived the happy idea of making a wounded ox carry his own beef towards the ship, but the beast resented direction, refused even to be led by the horns, and finally overthrew his captor, and had to be despatched incontinently. They rarely attack, and can generally be approached within rifle range with little trouble. Sometimes, however, they are unaccountably timid. Animals that have never seen men are said to be devoid of fear; but our experience does not bear out the statement. Every beast we met, from the musk ox to the lemming, was afraid of us. They seemed to take some time to realise that we did not belong to their world. But having once made up their minds, they showed even more terror than wild animals usually do.

Each musk ox gave us about two hundred pounds of meat, often most excellent, but occasionally tainted with the flavour that gives them their name. We failed to ascertain the source of this characteristic. It occurs in both sexes and at all ages; and, moreover, it is not peculiar to the musk ox, for a haunch of reindeer presented to us by the Governor of Egedesminde possessed the very same flavour. A long course of preserved food makes most fresh meat acceptable; walrus and seal became delicacies; owls, foxes, and even skuas are not to be despised; but genuinely musky musk ox is fit for nothing more civilised than Eskimo dogs.

HEAD OF MUSK OX.

According to the programme drawn up for our Expedition before we left England, the second ship was not to be carried beyond the 82° parallel of north latitude. The sheltered harbour in which the ships now lay was 81° 41´, and was in every way suited for the winter quarters of our consort. Here, accordingly, the first stage of the Expedition terminated. So far everything we had hoped for had been accomplished. Depôts to cover retreat in case of disaster had been duly deposited at the Carey Islands and at Cape Hawkes, and a suitable harbour for H.M.S. “Discovery” had been found beyond Lady Franklin Strait, in a higher northern latitude than any human being had yet wintered in. Much of the navigable season still remained, and though we had all long ago realised the absurdity of expecting open water in the Far North, we could not but look hopefully forward to the long stretch of coast line shown on the charts extending to within 6° of the Pole, interrupted only by “Army Fiord” and “Navy Opening.”

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