FINAL SPURT BEGUN 273 



when it came to traveling with my last party over the 

 polar ice, he would not have been so competent as the 

 white members of the expedition in getting himself 

 and his party back to the land. If Henson had been 

 sent back with one of the supporting parties from a 

 distance far out on the ice, and if he had encountered 

 conditions similar to those which we had to face on 

 the return journey in 1906, he and his party would 

 never have reached the land. While faithful to me, 

 and when with me more effective in covering distance 

 with a sledge than any of the others, he had not, as a 

 racial inheritance, the daring and initiative of Bartlett, 

 or Marvin, MacMillan, or Borup. I owed it to him 

 not to subject him to dangers and responsibilities which 

 he was temperamentally unfit to face. 



As to the dogs, most of them were powerful males, 

 as hard as iron, in good condition, but without an ounce 

 of superfluous fat; and, by reason of the care which I 

 had taken of them up to this point, they were all in 

 good spirits, like the men. The sledges, which were 

 being repaired that day, were also in good condition. 

 My food and fuel supplies were ample for forty days, 

 and by the gradual utilization of the dogs themselves 

 for reserve food, might be made to last for fifty days 

 if it came to a pinch. 



As the Eskimos worked away at repairing the 

 sledges while we rested there on the first day of April, 

 they stopped from time to time to eat some of the 

 boiled dog which the surplus numbers in Bartlett 's 

 returning team had enabled them to have. They had 

 killed one of the poorest dogs and boiled it, using the 

 splinters of an extra broken sledge for fuel under their 



