288 FOUR YEARS IN THE WHITE NORTH [April 



rents, it acts as a buttress against which great fields of 

 drift ice come smashing and cracking over the ice-foot, 

 raising a broken, chaotic mass sixty feet high. A view 

 from the summit on the south side of the cape was not 

 a bit encouraging — open water everywhere. 



Years ago I had read that the British North Pole 

 Expedition of 1875-76 had landed here and left a whale- 

 boat, built a cairn, and deposited a record. I thorough- 

 ly examined every nook, cleft, and crevice in hopes of 

 finding this forty- two-year-old boat. That night I 

 learned from one of my boys that this boat had been 

 found and taken away by the Eskimos many years 

 ago. 



Where were the cairn and records? Capt. Sir George 

 Nares says, in his Voyage to the Polar Sea: 



Commander Markham landed in a small bay on the south side 

 of the extreme point of the cape. After an extremely rough scram- 

 ble up one of the gulhes, a cairn was erected on the outer spur of 

 Cape Isabella, 700 feet above the water-line, a cask for letters and 

 a few cases of preserved meat being hidden away on a lower point, 

 about 300 feet high, magnetic west of the cairn. 



The gullies were filled with hard, compacted snow, 

 rendering the ascent difficult and dangerous. Noting 

 that my Eskimos lacked enthusiasm over the prospec- 

 tive journey, I sent them back to camp. In about an 

 hour I reached the summit, and there I found the cairn. 

 I rolled away stone after stone, removed the snow care- 

 fully, and examined the ground — not a trace of a record. 

 I followed carefully the steps in the snowbank cut on 

 the ascent to the ice-foot below. 



"Now for the cask," thought I to myself as I headed 

 west along the foot of the bluff. Climbing to the three- 

 hundred-foot level, I scanned the rocks carefully, finally 



