THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 223 



magnetic compass, it may seem strange that land lying to the east 

 should by compass be seventeen degrees west of north. This is 

 because the magnetic needle does not point to the North Pole, which 

 is north of us wherever we are unless we are standing on the Pole 

 itself, but approximates towards the magnetic pole, which is at some 

 not yet exactly located spot in the vicinity of the peninsula of 

 Boothia Felix in northeastern Canada. The saying that the needle 

 points to the magnetic pole is in few places on the earth an exact 

 truth. Its direction from Banks Island, when we speak "true" 

 and not "by compass," is southeasterly. 



For several days before we came in actual sight of what proved 

 to be Norway Island, our rendezvous, we had seen in the sky to 

 the eastward a peculiar pink glow. We thought it might be a re- 

 flection of dead grass covering the hills of Banks Island, but it 

 had another cause. When we commenced traveling over the land- 

 fast ice, some twenty miles offshore, we noticed in the snowbanks 

 that peculiar tinge of pink — it may sometimes almost verge on red 

 — due to the microscopic plant known as "pink snow." It was 

 this that was reflected pink in the sky. The layman finds it curi- 

 ous that these plants appear to flourish best on the north side of 

 snowdrifts, where the sun is least warm at any time and where 

 freezing may take place while another slope of the same drift is 

 thawing. In some mountain ranges these plants are said to be so 

 numerous in the snow that it has a pinkish tinge even when held 

 in the hand, but where we have traveled the pink can be seen only 

 at a distance of several yards and best at a distance of thirty or 

 forty yards, for on close approach the snow looks only white or a 

 little dingy. 



We were somewhat surprised to find the ice aground here in 

 thirty-nine meters, or about 120 feet. The actual freezing of sea 

 water does not produce ice in these or probably any latitudes of 

 more than six or seven feet in thickness, but the telescoping of it 

 under pressure may, as we have described elsewhere, increase this 

 thickness indefinitely. Few districts are more frequently under 

 violent stress than the west coast of Banks Island, where some of 

 the pressure-ridges project more than sixty feet above the water, 

 their base resting solidly on the bottom 120 feet below. It is a 

 peculiarity of the strong westerly winds on the north coast of 

 Alaska and the west coast of Banks Island that they bring with 

 them a high "storm tide," raising the level of the water six or 

 eight feet above ordinary high tide. The coastal ridges of ice are 

 thus heaped up, especially in the zone lying between five and twenty 



