90 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



One reason we stayed over at Leffingwell's was to help him meas- 

 ure a base for his triangulation, but the spell of bad weather lasted 

 too long and he was not particular about doing it just then, so 

 that eventually we proceeded towards Collinson Point without hav- 

 ing done him this little service. 



The distance to Collinson Point was about thirty miles. Al- 

 though the morning was fair, it turned out to be later one of the bad 

 blizzards of the year, and we did not know exactly where Thom- 

 sen's house was. But I did not want to pass it by, so we followed 

 along the coast about two hours after the last twilight gave way to 

 pitch darkness. Finding it was one of the feats that McConnell 

 has since written about as an example of what by analogy to wood- 

 craft may be called polarcraft. But that again was like finding your 

 way about in your home town. I knew that certain places were 

 suitable for house-building and others were not, and did not have 

 to look everywhere for this house but only at certain places where 

 it could reasonably be expected. I knew that Thomsen, being the 

 ordinary type of white man, would be sure to build where drift- 

 wood was especially abundant, and that driftwood accumulates only 

 on a particular kind of beach — usually facing northwest in this dis- 

 trict, as the high tides come with a west wind. It turned out when 

 we found the house that Captain Bernard was there with his dog 

 team. It had been a fairly long day, so the rest of our party stayed 

 overnight at Thomsen's, while Bernard hitched up a dog team and 

 took me on to Collinson Point. Wilkins and McConnell arrived the 

 following morning, thus bringing to an end their first winter jour- 

 ney. In my eyes they had covered themselves with credit, for they 

 had proved as adaptable to polar conditions as any men I ever saw — 

 and Wilkins not the less of the two though he hailed from sub- 

 tropic Australia and had never spent a winter north of England. 

 But, as intimated above, I think they were disappointed — here it was 

 almost Christmas time, this was the very middle of the dreadful 

 "polar night" (so called because for weeks the sun does not rise), 

 and they had finished a three hundred-mile sledge journey without 

 a hardship that came anywhere near storybook standards! 



