THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 163 



the start, when some of it was lost early, some had to be thrown 

 away, and some had to be sent back. 



When the support party left us we had an outfit that was to 

 last a year and a half in case of necessity; for at the beginning of 

 a trip we always expect that in addition to the immediate summer 

 for which the outfit is designed, we may have to spend the coming 

 winter in some uninhabited region, and again need it to take us to 

 some inhabited place the second spring. 



The final party who were going North into the unknown to seek 

 new information, to find new lands if there should be any, and to try 

 out a new theory of polar exploration were Storker Storkerson, Ole 

 Andreasen and myself. 



The final outfit consisted of six dogs, the most powerful that 

 we could get and four of them the best dogs I have ever used, and 

 a load of 1,236 pounds on a 208-pound sled, which meant that each 

 dog was hauling 240 pounds. In my diary for April 7th I say 

 that we had full rations for men for about thirty days and dog 

 feed for about forty days. In a way this food was the least im- 

 portant part of our load, for our theory of outfitting is that the 

 essentials are rifles, ammunition and other hunting gear, the scien- 

 tific instruments, cameras and photographic supplies, diaries, spare 

 clothing, bedding and cooking utensils. After these we take on as 

 much food and fuel as can be hauled without making the load too 

 heavy. Hauling fuel is more important than hauling food, and the 

 kind of fuel more important than the kind of food. Better kero- 

 sene burnt in a blue-flame stove than seal blubber burnt by any 

 method we have so far devised, whereas the choice of the most delect- 

 able food over seal or caribou meat is negligible to our comfort. 

 A primus stove cooks more rapidly than a seal-oil lamp and is 

 more cleanly than an outdoor fire of seal blubber. But we had lost 

 half our twelve gallons of fuel with Wilkins, and kerosene was des- 

 tined to give out sooner than food. 



As a hunting outfit we had one Gibbs-Mannlicher-Schoenauer 

 6.5 millimeter rifle with 170 rounds of ammunition, and one Win- 

 chester .30-30 carbine with 160 rounds. 



As scientific equipment we carried two sextants with the neces- 

 sary tables for computing latitude and longitude, two thermometers, 

 aneroid barometer, several prismatic compasses, a sounding ma- 

 chine with several leads and about 10,000 feet of wire. The time 

 for determining longitude was carried by an ordinary watch and by 

 a Waltham astronomical watch. The dial of this Waltham watch 

 was numbered to twenty-four hours instead of twelve, a great con- 



