CHAPTER VI
STEFANSSON’S DEPARTURE
For several days the ship had remained stationary,—that is, the ice had shown no signs of movement, and the weather had been generally calm. The Eskimo were becoming more successful in shooting seal for our fresh meat supply, which we kept in a kind of natural refrigerator that we had made by scooping out a hole in the ice not far from the ship. With the ship now apparently securely fixed for the winter, however, Stefansson came to the conclusion that it would be a good thing for some one to go ashore and get game.
He talked the matter over with me at some length on September 18. Kerdrillo was the only one of the Eskimo who had had any experience at deer-hunting and he knew a good deal about the country to the back of us. In fact he was more familiar with land hunting than with ice-travel. I had shot plenty of caribou in Grant Land and Ellesmere Land, as well as in Newfoundland and elsewhere, and volunteered to go, but Stefansson was the only one on board who not only knew how to hunt caribou but also was fully acquaintedwith the country. He had shot caribou in 1908 and 1909 along the shore from Cape Halkett to Flaxman Island and was not only familiar with all the fishing and trapping places of the Eskimo, not to be easily found by a newcomer to the region, but also knew every Eskimo there personally and might be able to buy fish and meat from them. He might even get some of the Eskimo families to join the expedition, the men as hunters and the women as seamstresses to make fur clothing for the ship’s company to wear during the winter which was now upon us. He had heard at Point Barrow that the carcasses of two whales had come ashore at Harrison Bay; these would make good food for our dogs. He decided, therefore, that the task logically devolved upon him. Plans were accordingly made for him to go ashore on the twentieth. We were off the mouth of the Colville River at this time, having drifted half way back to Point Barrow since reaching our farthest east the middle of August.
On the morning of the twentieth I was up early and got things together for the shore party which, besides Stefansson, consisted of Jenness, McConnell and Wilkins, the two Point Hope Eskimo, Jimmy and Jerry, with two sledges and twelve dogs. For supplies they took two Burberry tents, a stove with piping, two axes, a dozen candles, fourgallons of alcohol, a box of dog-biscuit, six tins of compressed tea-tablets, ten pounds of sugar, a supply of matches, three sleeping-bags, sheepskin sleeping-robes, two pieces of canvas for tents, four slabs of bacon, ten pounds of lard, one hundred and twenty pounds of fish, twenty pounds of rice, a box of tinned beef, five pounds of salt, a case of Underwood man-pemmican (we had two kinds of pemmican, one for men, the other for dogs, equally palatable and nourishing) fifteen pounds of chocolate, a box of ship’s biscuits or “pilot bread,” a Mannlicher rifle and a shotgun, with ammunition, six seal-floats and a camp cooking-set.
We all had luncheon together as usual. There was nothing out of the ordinary about the trip that was about to take place. Stefansson expected to be back in about ten days and there seemed no reason to suppose that the ship would not remain where she was until the next summer brought a genuine smashing-up of the ice and freed her. We all went out on the ice, however, to see the shore party off and Wilkins took some moving pictures.