Plan of Shipwreck Camp10th January to 1914.
Plan of Shipwreck Camp10th January to 1914.
Plan of Shipwreck Camp
10th January to 1914.
On the thirteenth we began sewing and kept it up day in and day out. We had done a good deal of sewing on shipboard, but I told the men that we must have plenty of fur clothing and skin-boots andthat we had better do all the sewing we could. We also made tents and covers of light canvas for our sledges. We should of course be unable to do any sewing when we once got under way for the land. We had lanterns and lamps for light in the various houses.
Fur clothing is so heavy that it has to be sewed by hand but much of the other work was done on sewing-machines of which we had saved two, one for the box-house and the other for the snow igloo. Keruk used one sewing-machine and Mr. Munro the other. He was skilful at this as at a good many other useful things. He had formerly been a junior officer on the British warshipRainbow, which was afterwards transferred to the Canadian service; his term of enlistment expired at the time of the transfer and Captain Hose of theRainbow, commandant of the Esquimault Navy Yard, recommended him to me for chief engineer of theKarluk.
On the fourteenth it was fine and clear with a temperature of thirty-eight degrees below zero. The wind was west; our soundings through a hole cut in the ice gave us thirty-four fathoms. In the noon twilight we could see land in a southwesterly direction. The men worked all day long making footbags to use when sleeping; it would be a great relief to take off the deerskin boots and put onthese footbags, which had fur inside and Burberry cloth outside. I had with me a coonskin coat which I had bought a few years before in Boston. I now cut this up and divided it among the men, as far as it would go, to be made into these footbags. In addition I told each man that he must have at least four pair of deerskin or sheepskin stockings and three pair of deerskin boots. We used scissors and knives to cut the skins into suitable pieces for making boots and clothing. The Eskimos used a crescent-shaped implement called thehudlow, not unlike a mince-meat chopper; they could use it very deftly and cut out clothing exceedingly well with it. The skins had to be softened, as I have mentioned before, by breaking the vellum; this was done by scraping it with a piece of iron like a chisel. Some Eskimo women soften the vellum by chewing it.
We conducted our lives according to a regular routine similar to that which we had followed on shipboard during the last few months of our drift. We kept our records of wind and weather, of soundings and of temperature, which remained in the minus thirties for a good many days. We did not bother with latitude as we had the land in view some sixty to eighty miles away, not distinctly visible but plain enough on a clear day when the light was fairly good. The light of course camefrom the south and the land, being in that direction, was set off by the twilight glow, and the sun was getting nearer and nearer to the horizon as the days went by. We saved a chronometer from the ship but it got somewhat banged about in the transfer from the ship to the camp, so that we could not depend upon it. I had a watch which I have carried for a number of years and which I was careful never to allow to run down.
Each house had a watchman, every man taking his turn. It was his duty to keep the fires going. At 6A. M.the watchman would call the cook; our meal hours were the same as those which we had observed during the past few months on the ship.
Lights were out at 10P. M.and all hands turned in. We had a stove in the centre of the room in each house and around the stove on three sides, built out from the walls, were the bed-platforms, which came close to the stove and were on a somewhat higher level. Here we slept warmly and comfortably on the mattresses we had saved from the ship.
There was plenty to occupy our minds. In addition to our sewing and other daily tasks, there was time for games of chess and cards and frequently of an evening we would gather around the fire and have a “sing.” Sometimes, too, we would dance; I remember one night catching hold ofsome one and taking a turn or two on the floor when we tipped over the stove. It took some lively work to get it set up again.