THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 185 



that under such circumstances would not have tightened their belts 

 and saved every scrap of food. I said so exultantly to my com- 

 panions and Storkerson helped me exult, for he had lived by hunting 

 for years and had acquired the hunter's temperament. But Ole had 

 more misgivings than he owned up to. 



By April 23rd in latitude 75° 15' N. we had entered an ice area 

 of a new sort. Up to this time every visible lead had given evi- 

 dence of much lateral motion; that is, the floe on one side had 

 evidently been moving east or west with reference to the floe on 

 the other side. But here we came to leads which had been opening 

 and closing at intervals all winter without any lateral motion. 

 There would be a belt of three or four-foot ice formed a little after 

 Christmas; then might come a belt of fifteen or twenty-inch ice 

 formed a month or so ago, and in the center of the lead five or 

 eight-inch ice not more than a week old. A lead of three such 

 belts evidently had opened only three times during the winter, but 

 there were others which showed they had opened half a dozen 

 times or more. But whether in four-foot ice or eighteen-inch ice, 

 the break when the lead had opened had never been a straight line. 

 Little projections and peninsulas on one side corresponded to inden- 

 tations and bays on the other side, and when we found that, we 

 knew the ice movement had been a simple opening where the sides 

 of the crack had withdrawn straight away from each other without 

 the lateral motion common inshore. In other words, this ice was 

 either not drifting at all, or the areas on both sides of the leads 

 were drifting in the same direction and at the same speed. 



For the present we had light northwest breezes and our sextant 

 observations showed we were drifting each day a very little to 

 the east. But as we knew that Banks Island was to the east and 

 only a few hundred miles away, we believed this slight drift due to 

 nothing but the crushing and buckling of the ice against the Banks 

 Island coast.* 



Up to April 25th we had been traveling daytimes and sleeping 



*We now believe that, for a reason unknown, there is an eddy in the 

 Beaufort Sea. We know from observation that at certain seasons there is 

 a westward movement of the ice along the north coast of Alaska. It carried 

 the Karluk a thousand miles in four months, from Camden Bay, Alaska, to 

 Wrangel Island. This westward current seems but the continuation of a 

 southward current we have observed on every occasion west of Banks Island 

 and Prince Patrick Island. We suppose there is a corresponding eastward 

 current offshore north of Alaska. Three hundred miles or more north of 

 Alaska the current is east, we think, bending south at Prince Patrick Island 

 and west when it comes near the mainland. A glance at the map will make 

 this clear. 



