164 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



venience and almost necessity because in summer when the sun 

 never sets and when at times there is thick, foggy weather for many 

 days in succession, it is often a matter of doubt, if you carry an 

 ordinary watch, whether it shows twelve o'clock midnight or twelve 

 o'clock noon. One may think that only extraordinary carelessness 

 would make you lose track of time so far that you are in doubt 

 which of the twelve-hour periods you are in, but it happens fre- 

 quently. Under special conditions we may travel fifteen or twenty 

 hours continuously, at times through the most exhausting kind of 

 going. At the end of this you may happen to get a blizzard which 

 induces you to rest in camp a while, free to sleep as long as you 

 need or desire. Where there is no darkness one's irregularity of 

 habits becomes extraordinary. We may not feel any special in- 

 convenience from staying awake twenty or thirty hours, and we are 

 equally likely to sleep for fifteen or eighteen hours. More than 

 once it has happened that we could argue as to whether we were 

 breakfasting in the morning or in the evening. But it never has 

 happened that we have slept so far beyond the twenty-four hours 

 recorded by the Waltham astronomical as to be in doubt of the time 

 it records. 



The first day after the support party left us we were able to 

 travel only a few hundred yards before being stopped by open water, 

 and as we had to stop, anyhow, I killed a seal that had stuck his 

 head up through some half-frozen mush. He was within reach 

 of my manak, but I could not pull him in because the forming 

 young ice offered too much resistance. The temperature at 8 o'clock 

 that evening was 11° F. but falling, and at that frost we thought 

 the mush might harden enough so that in the morning by the use 

 of skis we could walk out and get him. But our warm period 

 was not yet over and the temperature rose again. 



Now that I have mentioned skis I might say something about 

 their usefulness in polar work. I have heard one explorer say that 

 they are better than snowshoes because it is easier to kill dogs with 

 them. This advantage never appealed to us, since we never had 

 any dogs to be killed and have further found that with a good 

 dog kindness works better than a whip. I can not remember the 

 time when I did not know how to walk on skis, and as a boy there 

 was no sport I enjoyed so much as sliding down hill on them. But 

 I have never found them of any particular use in polar work except 

 in restricted areas. Amundsen used them around King William 

 Island and quite properly, for there the ice is level, as it is at 

 Coronation Gulf and at many other points where the sea is shielded 



