90 THE NORTH POLE 



of Brevoort Island we were fortunate in finding a strip 

 of open water, and steamed northward again, keeping 

 close to the shore. 



It must be remembered that from Etah to Cape 

 Sheridan, for the greater part of the course, the shores 

 on either side are clearly visible, — on the east the 

 Greenland coast, on the west the coast of Ellesmere 

 Land and Grant Land. At Cape Beechey, the narrow- 

 est and most dangerous part, the channel is only eleven 

 miles wide, and when the air is clear it almost seems 

 as if a rifle bullet might be fired from one side to the 

 other. These waters, save in exceptional seasons, are 

 filled with the heaviest kind of ice, which is constantly 

 floating southward from the Polar Sea toward Baffin 

 Bay. 



Whether this channel was carved in the solid land 

 by the force of pre-Adamite glaciers, or whether it is a 

 Titanic cleft formed by the breaking off of Greenland 

 from Grant Land, is a question still undetermined by 

 geologists; but for difficulty and danger there is no 

 place to compare with it in the whole arctic region. 



It is hard for a layman to understand the character 

 of the ice through which the Roosevelt fought her way. 

 Most persons imagine that the ice of the arctic regions 

 has been formed by direct freezing of the sea water; 

 but in the summer time very little of the floating ice 

 is of that character. It is composed of huge sheets 

 broken off from the glacial fringe of North Grant Land 

 broken up by contact with other floes and with the 

 land, and driven south under the impetus of the violent 

 flood tides. It is not unusual to see there ice between 

 eighty and one hundred feet thick. As seven-eighths 



