MAKING SOUNDINGS“We got the Lucas sounding-machine together, and installed it on the ice at the edge of the dredge hole. With this machine on October 11 we got 1,000 fathoms.”
MAKING SOUNDINGS“We got the Lucas sounding-machine together, and installed it on the ice at the edge of the dredge hole. With this machine on October 11 we got 1,000 fathoms.”
MAKING SOUNDINGS
“We got the Lucas sounding-machine together, and installed it on the ice at the edge of the dredge hole. With this machine on October 11 we got 1,000 fathoms.”
The temperature now went down to fifteen below zero and our soundings by the Kelvin sounding-machine gave us no bottom at 270 fathoms. We bent on a reel of 350 fathoms more and got no bottom at 500 fathoms. Then we got the Lucas sounding-machine together and installed it on theice at the edge of the dredge hole. With this machine, on October 11 we got 1000 fathoms.
The dog that had floated off the day before came back; this made me happy, because dogs were valuable to us and this particular dog, whose name was Molly, was going to have a litter of pups. All the dogs were now put back on the ice again, for the leads had all closed up and the danger appeared to be over for the present.
Our Eskimo seamstress, Keruk, was working industriously and by now had completed her fifteenth pair of winter deerskin boots. These are made from the leg and foot of reindeer that have been killed during the later fall or winter when they have their winter coats on, cut up into four or five strips which are all sewed together to form leggins, the hairy part inside; the sole is made from the skin of the ugsug, or bearded seal. Keruk worked on fur clothing also. She did the cutting and much of the sewing; some of the men knew how to sew and they helped, too.
We continued our general drift to the north-west until October 22, when for a few days the wind shifted and sent us south and east before we took up our westward drift again. We were then about twenty-five miles south of where Keenan Land should have been, according to the map ofthe Arctic Region prepared by Gilbert H. Grosvenor, director and editor of the National Geographic Society, for Peary’s book “The North Pole,” a copy of which we had in the ship’s library. We were near enough to have seen Keenan Land with a telescope from the masthead, on a fine clear day, but though we kept a constant lookout for it from the crow’s nest, we saw no signs of it whatever.
All this time we continued to get a good many seal. Most of these were shot by the Eskimo, whose skill at hunting of this kind far exceeded that of any other members of the party. We needed the flesh for fresh meat for ourselves and fed the skins and blubber to the dogs. The seal is the one indispensable animal of the Arctic. Its flesh is by no means disagreeable, though it has a general flavor of fish, which constitutes the seal’s chief food.
We continued our preparations for an extended stay in the ice. The ship was now some two feet lighter than she had been the middle of August when first frozen in; we had burned a good deal of coal and had removed coal, biscuit, beef, pemmican and numerous other things from the deck and also from the hold, sledging them to the heavy floe of which I have already spoken. This floe was about half an acre in size and about thirty feet thick,of blue ice, amply able to stand a good deal of knocking about before breaking up. We now cut the ship out of the ice which was fast to her sides, so that she would ride up to her proper level before freezing in again.
Whether we were to continue in the ice or get clear, it was well to have a good supply of emergency stores safe on the ice, because with any ship at sea there is always the danger of fire. When we got theRooseveltto Cape Sheridan in 1905 and again in 1908 we unloaded her at once and put the supplies on land, building a house of the unopened biscuit boxes, so that if the ship should chance to get afire and burn up completely we should simply have had to walk back to Etah with our supplies and wait for our relief ship. This experience I now applied to our situation on theKarluk. We had various coal-stoves on board, one in the saloon, one in the scientists’ room, one in my room, with fires in the galley and Mr. Hadley’s carpenter’s shop and of course in the engine-room, while the Eskimo had blubber stoves of soapstone in the quarters we had built for them on deck. Besides all these stoves we had numerous lamps. To guard against the danger from fire we had chemical fire extinguishers and about fifty blocks of snow, distributed wherever there was room for them about the ship, and in the galley a hundred-gallon tankwith a fire kept going constantly under it to keep the water from freezing. We had a fire-fighting corps, every man of which knew what he must do in case of fire. If fire broke out, the ship’s bell would be rung and everybody would seize a block of snow or the fire extinguisher or the buckets near the water-tank, as his duty required, and help extinguish the fire.
Our supplies on the big floe we left at first where we put them. Later on as we got opportunity we built a regular house, with walls composed of boxes and bags of coal, cases of biscuit, barrels and other large articles, with lumber, of which we had put two thousand feet over on the ice, for flooring, scantling for roof and an extra suit of the ship’s sails to cover all. We banked it all around with snow for warmth. There was a kind of vestibule of snowbanks and a canvas door so weighted that it would fly to of itself. Later still, in addition to this box-house, we built a large snow igloo.
On the fourteenth for the first time we discontinued the regular nautical routine of watch and watch and instead had a night watchman and a day watchman, all taking turns at the work.