252 THENORTHPOLE 



ored by good going, he reeled off full twenty miles, 

 notwithstanding a snow-storm part of the time, which 

 made it hard to see. The temperature, which varied 

 from 16° to 30° below zero, indicated that there was 

 more or less open water to the west, from which direc- 

 tion the wind came. During this march we crossed 

 several leads covered with young ice, treacherous 

 under the recently fallen snow. Along the course of 

 one of these leads we saw the fresh track of a polar 

 bear going west, over two hundred miles from land. 



At half-past ten on the morning of the 25th I came 

 upon Bartlett and Henson with their men, all in camp, 

 in accordance with my instructions to wait for me at 

 the end of their fifth march. I turned them all out, 

 and every one jumped in to repair the sledges, redis- 

 tribute the loads, weed out the least efficient dogs, 

 and rearrange the Eskimos in the remaining divisions. 



While this work was going on, Marvin, favored 

 by clear weather, took another meridian observation 

 for latitude and obtained 86° 38'. This placed us, as I 

 expected, beyond the Italian record, and showed that 

 in our last three marches we had covered a distance 

 of fifty minutes of latitude, an average of sixteen and 

 two-thirds miles per march. We were thirty-two days 

 ahead of the Italian record in time. 



I was doubly glad of the result of the observations, 

 not only for the sake of Marvin, whose services had 

 been invaluable and who deserved the privilege of 

 claiming a higher northing than Nansen and Abruzzi, 

 but also for the honor of Cornell University, to the 

 faculty of which he belonged, and two of whose alumni 

 and patrons had been generous contributors to the 



