CHAPTER XII 



THE ICE FIGHT GOES ON 



TO recount all the incidents of this upward 

 journey of the Roosevelt would require a 

 volume. When we were not fighting the ice, 

 we were dodging it, or — worse still — waiting in 

 some niche of the shore for an opportunity to do more 

 fighting. On Sunday, the sixth day out from Etah, 

 the water continued fairly open, and we made good 

 progress until one o'clock in the afternoon, when we 

 were held up by the ice pack as we were nearing Lin- 

 coln Bay. A cable was run out, and the ship secured 

 to a great floe, which extended some two miles to the 

 north and several to the east. The tide, which was 

 running north at the time, had carried the smaller ice 

 with it, leaving the Roosevelt in a sort of lake. While 

 we were resting there, some of the men observed a 

 black object far out on the great ice floe to which we 

 were attached, and Dr. Goodsell and Borup, with two 

 Eskimos, started out to investigate. This walking 

 across the floes is dangerous, as the ice is full of cracks, 

 some of them quite wide, and on the day in question 

 the cracks were for the most part concealed by a recent 

 snowfall. In jumping across a lead, the men had a 

 narrow escape from drowning, and when they got within 

 shooting distance of the black object they were seeking, 

 it proved to be only a block of stone. 



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