THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 143 



of his ship or some Eskimo house into which he could retreat, and 

 where in a cozy interior his mind was free to endow the gales out- 

 side with the horrors that those of us fail to notice who fight them 

 daily as an incident of our work. My weather entry for that day is, 

 "Clear, snow drifting, wind N. E. 30°;" which being translated 

 means that although the snow was whirling around us enough to 

 explain the statement that we soon disappeared from sight, there 

 was clear sky to be seen overhead. 



My diary does go into some detail as to equipment. The first 

 sled was driven by Captain Bernard with seven dogs and a load of 

 1,020 pounds; Wilkins came next with seven dogs and 789 pounds; 

 then Castel with five dogs and 644 pounds; and Storkerson last 

 with six dogs and 960 pounds. Andreasen and Johansen held them- 

 selves ready to assist any of the teams that might get stuck in a 

 snowdrift or to right any overturned sled. It was my part to go 

 ahead carefully picking a way between the masses of jagged, up- 

 turned ice that make the surface of the northern seas in winter not 

 the level expanse those may imagine who have seen only lake ice, 

 but something between a system of miniature mountain ranges and 

 the interior of a granite quarry. 



This first day everything went as well as could be expected. The 

 gale of the 17th had broken up badly all the offshore ice beyond the 

 six-mile limit, so that at the end of three hours we came to the meet- 

 ing line of the land-fast ice and the moving pack. Seal hunters 

 from the Belvedere and Polar Bear had assured us that for twenty 

 or thirty miles offshore there had been since Christmas no move- 

 ment of the ice before the 17th, but now it was an archipelago of 

 large ice islands floating in a sea of mush and water and moving 

 past us to the east at the rate of half a mile an hour. 



We had some hope of heavy frost that night. Ten or fifteen 

 hours of twenty or thirty degrees below zero would, had the wind 

 ceased, have solidified everything into ice possible to travel over, 

 although scarcely with safety, for the chief danger zone in polar ex- 

 ploration is the mush belt where the pack grinds itself into pieces 

 against the edge of the land-fast ice. But the temperature in spite 

 of calm did not go below zero, and although there was little motion 

 in the ice outside of us, the next morning the conditions were by 

 no means ideal. By pressure from seaward the ice cakes were 

 heaped against each other and against the shore floe, and as the 

 season was too late for awaiting more favorable opportunity, we 

 struck off on this insecure ice. For about a mile and a half we went 

 on, crossing from cake to cake where the corners touched and occa- 



