CHAPTER IX
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 6A. M.to 6P. 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 andfrozen, 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 theycan bathe by paying twenty-five cents and they patronize it freely. We had several bath-tubs on theKarluk.
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-fourdegrees 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 gotspecimens 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 theBoston 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 notwhat 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 apparentlysaw 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 weall 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 theRooseveltfrom 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 intones 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.