180 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



It is not possible to give to the wonderful dogs too much credit 

 for any success on this journey. The day of April 17th, for in- 

 stance, they were still hauling over two hundred pounds each. The 

 snow was firm but rough, and the sled was continually going up 

 and down over hard drifts. There were also pressure-ridges to 

 cross, though none bad enough to necessitate the pickaxe. It is 

 true that the dogs alone could not have taken the sled over some 

 of the ridges, but it was only there that the men did the least bit 

 to help. The rest of the time they were running beside the sled, 

 commonly with hands resting on it, and I was running ahead. We 

 made that day an -average of nearly four miles an hour, which 

 meant a speed of over five miles on the level stretches. 



Although the dogs themselves were excellent, part of this superi- 

 ority was due to the harnessing. When dogs are harnessed fan- 

 wise as they are in Greenland and as they have been by many 

 explorers, it is only, as I have said, the dog in the middle of the 

 team that can pull straight ahead; the others pull at considerable 

 angles with the course of travel, so that a part of their force is lost. 

 This in some measure explains why it is that few explorers have 

 been able to haul more than a hundred pounds to the dog, which 

 is less than half of what ours hauled. But I believe the main supe- 

 riority was in the breed. 



In eleven years of experience in the Arctic I have used dogs of 

 all sorts. Some were brought from Greenland by Amundsen on his 

 Gjoa voyage of 1904-06 and left by him near the Mackenzie delta, 

 where I used them. We have also at different times had a hundred 

 or more Eskimo dogs from the district around Victoria Island, 

 where this dog is presumably as pure as he is anywhere in the 

 world, for there the people and consequently the dogs have been 

 least in touch with the outside world. We have also used several 

 hundred dogs of mixed Eskimo descent from the Mackenzie district 

 and the north coast of Alaska, where the dogs as well as the Es- 

 kimos themselves have been subject to outside contact for from 

 thirty to a hundred years. We have had a few Siberian dogs and 

 about fifty of the type most favored for driving by the miners around 

 Nome, Alaska. On the basis of our experience with all these va- 

 rieties we have come to a conclusion on the whole very unfavor- 

 able to the Eskimo dog. 



For one thing, the Eskimo dog is too small. Those we have 

 had ran in weight from fifty to seventy pounds, and to haul such a 

 load as our six dogs were carrying would need at least nine of the 

 best Eskimo dogs. The disadvantage of having nine dogs as against 



