SHIPWRECK CAMP“We placed a record in a copper tank on the ice, telling where the ship was lost and when we left camp, with the names of the members of the various parties as they had left.... Over the camp we left the British ensign flying.”See page 143
SHIPWRECK CAMP“We placed a record in a copper tank on the ice, telling where the ship was lost and when we left camp, with the names of the members of the various parties as they had left.... Over the camp we left the British ensign flying.”See page 143
SHIPWRECK CAMP
“We placed a record in a copper tank on the ice, telling where the ship was lost and when we left camp, with the names of the members of the various parties as they had left.... Over the camp we left the British ensign flying.”See page 143
At the fourth camp I found a note from Munro saying that they had been held up there by open water and a heavy gale, the same, evidently, which had detained us at Shipwreck Camp, and that they had shot a polar bear near by. This I knew even before I read the note for I found a big piece of bear-meat that they had left in the igloo for us. They had been unable to take all the pemmican at the cache here along with them; we picked up a few tins of it but could not take any more, for we were already overburdened.
Munro’s note further said that the trail beyond was badly smashed but we went on as fast as we could, for we wanted to catch up with Kerdrillo and I was anxious to know that the advance party was continuing to get along well. At quarter past four we reached the sixth igloo. These camps were from four to ten miles apart. We found at this camp five gallons of oil, which the advance party left, three cases of pemmican, four cases of biscuit and some alcohol. There should have been another cache near by but the ice had raftered under pressure of the recent storm and destroyed it, thereby losing us a lot of biscuit and pemmican, and, what was just then even more valuable, perhaps, twelve gallons of oil.
At half past four we finally came up with Kerdrillo and his party. We had made the thirty miles from Shipwreck Camp to the sixth camp in two days, going twelve the first day and eighteen the second. Kerdrillo and his family were already occupying the igloo at this camp so we built another for ourselves.
In building a snow-igloo the first thing to do is to find a level place where the ice is heavy and will not crack; it is of course not always possible to find the ideal spot and you have to be content with the heaviest ice you can find and take your chances. The snow should be hard and firmly packed. You start in cutting blocks of snow with a snow-knife, an implement which has a steel blade about a foot and a half long, two inches wide and a sixteenth of an inch thick, with a wooden handle about six inches long, an inch and a half wide and a quarter of an inch thick; we had lengthened the handles of our snow-knives by lashing hatchet-handles to them, as I have already mentioned, so that we could use both hands in wielding them. Sometimes instead of a snow-knife we would use an ordinary hand-saw in cutting the blocks out; we could often do more work with this than with a snow-knife. The Eskimo in the distant past used to use a knife made of stone or bone.
The size of the snow-blocks varied. For thelower tiers of the walls of the igloo we used blocks as large as could be cut without breaking; for the upper tiers the size was somewhat smaller, tapering off to the roof. The blocks varied in thickness from a foot and a half to two feet, according to the condition of the snow. A properly completed igloo is round, with a conical roof which requires considerable skill and practice to make. It took our Eskimo a long time, however, to cover in the roof, so we used to use the tent we had with us for the roof, with our snowshoes and ski for a tent-pole. Our igloos were square instead of round. Inside we would build a bed-platform of snow, large enough for us all to sleep on; we would place our fur sleeping-robes on this platform and lie down to sleep. We slept in our clothes, with no covering over us; it is not safe to use sleeping-bags on the sea-ice for when the ice cracks underneath you, the sleeping-bags hobble your arms and legs and you drown. We never caught cold; in fact “colds” and pneumonia do not exist in the Arctic beyond the limit of habitation of civilized man.
When we got our igloo built we would make a half-circular opening in one of the sides and crawl in; then we would fill up this opening with a snow-block, cut down to fit it tightly enough to make it air-proof. For ventilation we had small holes punched in the walls. Once inside we would lightour Primus stove and make our tea, eat our biscuit and pemmican by candlelight, lie down and go to sleep.
We were not ordinarily troubled with insomnia, but sometimes, like a peaceful community the night before the Fourth, we were kept awake in spite of ourselves. Between ten and eleven on the night of the twenty-fifth, for instance, the ice began to crack in the vicinity of our camp and from time to time we in our igloo would feel severe shocks, as of an earthquake. Through the snow walls I could hear the Eskimo out on the ice. Kataktovick went out to see what was up and came back at once to tell me that a crack two or three feet wide had opened through the middle of Kerdrillo’s igloo, which was about five yards away from ours, and that they had nearly lost their little baby but fortunately had got out before anything happened to them.
The ice continued to crack about us all through the night. There was no crack in our igloo so I gave it to Keruk and her children for the rest of the night and we walked back and forth, waiting for daylight. It was not very dark for the stars were shining brilliantly. The temperature was about forty below zero. All around us the ice was breaking and at times we were on a floating island.