CAPE SHERIDAN AT LAST 123 



While the oil was being unloaded, a party of men 

 went out with ice chisels, poles, saws, and so forth, 

 chopping away the ice so that we could warp the 

 Roosevelt in, broadside to the shore. Bartlett and 

 I were determined to get the ship beyond the floe- 

 berg barrier and into the shallow water of the ice- 

 foot. We were not looking forward to another winter 

 of such torment as we had lived through on the last 

 previous expedition, with the ship just on the edge of 

 the ice-foot and subject to every movement of the 

 hostile pack outside. 



After the oil cases came the tons of whale meat 

 from the quarter-deck, some of it in chunks as large 

 as a Saratoga trunk. It was thrown over the side 

 onto the ice, sledged ashore by the Eskimos, some hun- 

 dred yards over the ice-foot, and heaped in great 

 piles, protected by the bags of coal which had also 

 been taken from the quarter-deck. Then came the 

 whale-boats, which were lowered from the davits and 

 run ashore like sledges. They were later turned 

 bottom side up for the winter and weighted down, 

 so that the wind could not move them. 



The work of landing the supplies and equipment 

 consumed several days. This is the very first work 

 of every well-managed arctic expedition on reaching 

 winter quarters. With the supplies ashore, the loss 

 of the ship by fire or by crushing in the ice, would mean 

 simply that the party might have to walk home. It 

 would not interfere with the sledge work, nor seri- 

 ously cripple the expedition. Had we lost the Roose- 

 velt at Cape Sheridan, we should have spent the winter 

 in the box houses which we constructed and in the 



