192 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



for a long period a thin stew or soup made from rice, butter, choco- 

 late and malted milk boiled together. But a dozen men have now- 

 tried this diet on our ice trips and most of us prefer it to anything 

 else we have tried. Some of my men, partly because they were 

 sailors with acquired food tastes, have preferred peameal in place 

 of rice. In point of theory peameal would undoubtedly be better 

 than rice if the chocolate were absent, but so long as there is choco- 

 late to supply the protein I prefer the rice; if for no other reason, 

 because it is easy to cook. 



Many travelers have refrained from carrying rice in the belief 

 that it was not easy to cook. True, the cook-books tell you some 

 such thing as that you should boil rice for twenty minutes. This 

 would surely be a waste of fuel for those who travel on fuel rations, 

 although for ourselves we need not care. But we have found that 

 if we put the rice into cold water and when the pot comes to a 

 boil set it aside for a few minutes, the rice is thoroughly cooked 

 before it cools enough for eating, and not more than one minute 

 of actual boiling is needed. We used no more fuel in boiling a pot 

 of rice than Peary used in making a pot of tea. On some trips 

 we have carried things as difficult to cook properly as beans. 

 Time for cooking them cannot be taken except on stormbound 

 days, but on such occasions boiling them is a pastime. 



I am now of the opinion that the fewness of the seal signs at 

 distances of two or three hundred miles from shore was due mainly 

 to the hurry we were in. The level places where they might have 

 been found happened only occasionally to be on our actual route, 

 and as we never felt we could stop and look around, nothing could 

 be noticed except what was actually in our way. How much is it 

 explicable, then, that others may have failed entirely to notice seal 

 signs because they have been possessed with the idea that there 

 was no use looking for game signs when game was absent, or else 

 that seals if present could not be secured? For well-known explor- 

 ers, so far as I know, have not been experienced seal-hunters as 

 Storkerson and I were, and seem to have been quite unfamiliar 

 with the technique of seal hunting, even theoretically. 



On the evening of May 7th our faith in the presence of seals 

 had confirmation. We had pitched camp on the shore of a lead 

 about a mile wide, covered with young ice not strong enough to 

 bear a man. We had camped a little earlier than usual, and while 

 the men were cooking supper I sat for about an hour on top of a 

 high ice hummock, studying the lead with binoculars for several 

 miles in both directions as though I had been on a hilltop near the 



