THE ICE-PACK“On the sea-ice you have to spend a great deal of time looking about for good places to make the road for the sledging of supplies, for the ice is continually cracking and shifting and piling up.”
THE ICE-PACK“On the sea-ice you have to spend a great deal of time looking about for good places to make the road for the sledging of supplies, for the ice is continually cracking and shifting and piling up.”
THE ICE-PACK
“On the sea-ice you have to spend a great deal of time looking about for good places to make the road for the sledging of supplies, for the ice is continually cracking and shifting and piling up.”
For the past week or so, I had noticed that our drift was slow, and I felt that as the daylight lengthened we should have ample time, long before we could drift away from the land, to sledge enough supplies ashore to last the party until the birds returned and the ice broke up. If we could start the men in small parties to relay supplies to the island we could get a shore camp established where the men could dry out their foot-gear for their journey back over the ice to Shipwreck Camp for more supplies, especially if we should find plenty of driftwood on Wrangell Island, as I hoped and expected; we had fuel enough at the camp to last a year. The men could erect permanent snow igloos along the way, for relay stations, and once the road to the island was made, there would be little difficulty in keeping it open and bycontinuing the relays any faults that might come in the trail could be easily repaired. In these preliminary journeys, as I have said, the men would get accustomed to ice travel and finally the whole party, with its supplies, would be safe ashore. We were of course handicapped by lack of sufficient dogs, and in ice travel and in fact in any polar work, dogs are the prime requisites for success; man-power for hauling the sledge-loads of supplies puts a double burden on the men.
Those assigned for the first shoregoing party were First Mate Anderson, Second Mate Barker and Sailors King and Brady. They were to go to the island with three sledges and eighteen dogs, with Mamen and the two Eskimo men, as a supporting party, to come back with the dogs and two of the sledges after they had landed the mate’s party on the island.
The eighteenth was another bad day, with a strong northeast gale and blinding snowdrift. Some of the men were at work loading the three sledges for the mate’s party. Of the others, those that could be spared I sent out with pickaxes to make a trail towards the land, so that the shoregoing party might have a good start, but the weather was so bad that they had to return to camp after they had gone two or three miles. They reported seeing bear tracks on the ice and seal in openleads which they came to. We had plenty of seal meat so no attempt was made to do any shooting at this time.
Mr. Anderson, McKinlay and myself checked over the three sledge-loads on the nineteenth and found everything in readiness for the journey which was to begin the next morning. The next day, however, the bad weather continued. The watchman called me at 4A. M.and I found a southwest gale blowing, with a thick snowstorm, so, as there was no change in the weather, the mate’s party did not leave. In the afternoon the storm subsided and by midnight the sky was clear and the air calm and cold.
The next day, Wednesday the twenty-first, conditions were more favorable and the party started. In addition to oral instructions about ice conditions and about returning to camp in case he met with open water, I gave the mate the following written orders:
Shipwreck Camp, Arctic Ocean,January 20, 1914.My dear Mr. Anderson:You will leave to-morrow morning with Mamen, three sledges, 18 dogs, Mr. Barker, Sailors King and Brady and the two Eskimo. The sledges are loaded with pemmican, biscuit and oil. You will find list of articles attached to this. When you reach Berry Point, Wrangell Island, you will bein charge of supplies. Kindly pay special attention to the uses of them. The rations are: 1 lb. pemmican, 1 lb. biscuits, with tea, per day. One gallon of oil will last you ten days. Mamen will leave one sledge and the tent, taking back with him enough supplies to carry him to Shipwreck. Whilst on the island you will endeavor to find game. Be sure and bring it to your camp. Also collect all the driftwood you can find.Very sincerely,R. A. Bartlett.
Shipwreck Camp, Arctic Ocean,January 20, 1914.My dear Mr. Anderson:
You will leave to-morrow morning with Mamen, three sledges, 18 dogs, Mr. Barker, Sailors King and Brady and the two Eskimo. The sledges are loaded with pemmican, biscuit and oil. You will find list of articles attached to this. When you reach Berry Point, Wrangell Island, you will bein charge of supplies. Kindly pay special attention to the uses of them. The rations are: 1 lb. pemmican, 1 lb. biscuits, with tea, per day. One gallon of oil will last you ten days. Mamen will leave one sledge and the tent, taking back with him enough supplies to carry him to Shipwreck. Whilst on the island you will endeavor to find game. Be sure and bring it to your camp. Also collect all the driftwood you can find.
Very sincerely,
R. A. Bartlett.
The list of things carried on the sledge may serve to show what the Arctic traveller needs. Shelter, fuel and food, these are the three essentials for ice travel as they are for the journey of life itself. This is the way the mate’s party was equipped when it set out from Shipwreck Camp on January 21, 1914; there were enough supplies to last them for three months:
First Sledge:
Second Sledge:
Third Sledge:
To Mamen I gave a brief letter of instructions, concluding with this paragraph: “Should you miss the trail and fail to connect with our camp, after a reasonable time has been spent in looking it up, you will go back to Wrangell Island and await my arriving there.”
The party got away at 9.30A. M., accompanied for about five miles by other members of the expeditionto give them a good start. There was a strong east wind, with drifting snow, but the weather cleared later in the day and it grew calm in the evening. There was about four hours’ light a day now good for travelling.
Beyond its representation on our charts, we knew little about Wrangell Island, the chief source of our information being a short section in the American “Coast Pilot,” which read as follows: “This island was first seen by the exploring party under the Russian Admiral Wrangell and named after the leader, though he himself doubted its existence; its southwestern point lies due North (true) 109 miles from Cape North. It must have been known to the whalers, who, about the year 1849, commenced to visit this sea, and did so for many years in great numbers. TheJeannette’speople also saw it for many days in their memorable drift northwestward; but the first person to land on it, of which we have any authentic information, was Lieut. Hooper of the U. S. S.Corwinin 1881, and later in the same year it was explored by parties from the U. S. S.Rodgers, these two vessels having been sent to search for or obtain information concerning theJeannette, the remnant of whose crew were perishing in the delta of the Lena at the very time this island was being explored.
“Wrangell Island is about 75 miles long E. N.W. and W. S. W., and from 25 to 30 miles wide, not including the large bare sandspits which extend a long way from the shore, as much as 12 miles in one place from the northern side, and rather more near the southwestern corner of the island. A range of hills extends completely round the coast, and a lower range traverses the centre of the island from east to west, the whole island in fact being a succession of hills, peaks and valleys. The highest point appeared to be Berry peak, near the centre of the island, about 2500 feet in height by barometric measurement.”
On the twenty-second I sent Chafe and Williams out to begin marking the landward trail with empty pemmican tins. Pemmican has been the staple article of food for polar expeditions for many years and contains, in small compass, the essentials adequate to support life. It is put up by various packing-houses, expressly for such needs as ours. I have lived for a hundred and twenty days on pemmican, biscuit and tea and found it amply sufficient. We had two kinds of pemmican; one, for ourselves, consisting of beef, raisins, sugar and suet, all cooked together and pressed, was packed in blue tins; the other, for the dogs, without the raisins and sugar, in red tins.
I remember once, after a talk which I was giving on the North Pole trip, a lady came up to me andinquired what pemmican was, which I had mentioned several times. I explained what it was made of and what it was used for. She thought for a moment and then said, “Well, what I don’t understand is how you shoot them.”
Pemmican tins hold six pounds, marked so that you can tell how to take out exactly a pound, which, with tea and a pound of biscuit, is the standard daily ration per man. These tins are about fourteen inches in length, five in width and three in thickness. We would open a tin on one side and use up the contents; then we would open out the other side and flatten them all down to make a sheet. Plastered against an ice pinnacle to mark the trail or indicate a fault or the proximity of open water, these red or blue sheets of tin were visible against their white background for a mile and a half or two miles. This was one of the many things which I learned on my expeditions with Peary. Mamen had instructions to blaze his trail in this way so that he could find his way back. Marking the trail from the camp landward would now give the men training in ice travel.
We had something resembling the typical “January thaw” of the New England winter on the twenty-third. The air seemed to have a touch of springtime in it and there was open water about two miles to the south of us.
The next day we improved the time in overhauling the house that we had built out of boxes for the Eskimo, to make it more comfortable. Later on I was in the supply tent when I heard a confused noise in the galley. I waited a moment and then heard a tremendous racket of dishes rattling down and equipment being upset. I hurried out of the tent and into the galley. The canvas roof of the galley was on fire and parts of the rafters near the funnel. It was a pitch roof and around the funnel, where it passed through a hole in the roof, were a couple of tin collars and some asbestos. The cook had the stove pretty hot and as the canvas was dry and got overheated it had suddenly burst into flame. He was waving his arms around and trying to put the fire out with water and as he was very much in earnest about it he naturally did not always look to see where he was going and bumped violently into whatever happened to be in his way; hence the noise I had heard. A block of snow soon had the fire out.
McKinlay found a box of cocoa the same day and played a joke on us. When we were getting the emergency supplies overboard after the ship was struck I had given instructions that no tobacco should be saved, for I knew we could not afford to burden ourselves with a great supply of it on oursledge journeys later on and so we might as well get used to going without it as soon as possible. Some of the men happened to have some with them when they left the ship, however, and we smoked that while it lasted but it was already getting to be a scarce article. A good many odds and ends were continually turning up under the snow, however, and some of the men had an idea that if they looked for tobacco they might find some. So McKinlay set out to investigate.
In due time he returned, saying nothing but looking as if he knew something. We waited for him to hand over the tobacco or tell us where it was and at last we became so aroused that we made him guide us to the spot where he had been looking. He brought us to a place where a box was covered up in the snow, dug it up and handed it over, while we imagined the good smoke we were to have at last. It was a box of cocoa. McKinlay had the time of his life about it and we all laughed with him, though the joke was on us; I felt it incumbent on me, however, to show the joker that he couldn’t trifle with our feelings with impunity, so I chased him laughing over the ice and scrubbed his face in a snow-bank.
As a consolation prize I hunted through the supply tent for a little tobacco which I knew wasthere among the dunnage; I finally found it, divided it into small pieces and distributed it in that way to the whole party.
The chief engineer found some more treasure—two coffee percolators which were buried in the snow. When the cook tried to make coffee in them, however, he found that they wouldn’t percolate.
Late in the day Chafe and Williams returned and reported no changes to mark in the trail, so far as they went.