THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 261 



In the morning after breakfast while they were arranging the dog 

 packs and making ready for the march, I would start out with the 

 aim of keeping three or four miles ahead of them all day. I trav- 

 eled from hilltop to hilltop making little temporary monuments 

 and leaving messages for them in case I had seen through my glasses 

 anything on the basis of which any plan ought to be changed. It 

 might be that I could see a bay running inland ahead of us, and my 

 message would give warning and direct the course. Or I might 

 see game, in which event the note would tell them whether to wait 

 and watch until they saw the outcome of my hunting, or to make 

 camp at some specified spot, or perhaps to go ahead to some other 

 hill from which they could watch the hunting operations better. 

 For several days no game was seen, nor were we in need of any, 

 for we had started with dried meat enough for five or six days. 



I was able to travel much faster than the others, for heavily laden 

 pack dogs will walk only about a mile and a half an hour. When 

 no hunting was on I did such things as sketch an outline of the 

 coast. Now and then I went down to the beach, following 

 it for a mile or two at a time and sticking up on end any small pieces 

 of driftwood found, the idea being that they would thus be more 

 easily discoverable above the snow next winter should we have 

 occasion to follow the coast by sled. 



The Admiralty chart proved rather inaccurate, as it had been 

 made on the basis of observations from McClure's ship sailing 

 along several miles from the land on its way north in 1851. Inves- 

 tigations since made at my request by the Royal Geographical 

 Society indicate that some of this map was based not on any survey 

 or sketches made at the time, but on log book entries, narratives, or 

 possibly even the memoirs of men who were on the journey. Noth- 

 ing more than a very general correspondence between the facts and 

 such a map can be expected 



There are several islands along the coast although only one, 

 Terror Island, is shown on McClure's chart. On the map the coast- 

 line is undulating, without deep bays or harbors; on the real land 

 there are many deep bays and many harbors, if their entrances 

 prove adequate when sounded. I am inclined to think, from the 

 evidence of driftwood on the beach, that during the last short while, 

 geologically speaking, the coast has been rising; but that before 

 that there must have been a long period of considerable subsidence 

 and there are, accordingly, long arms of the sea stretching inland 

 through "drowned" valleys. Relying on the map, we tried for the 

 first few days to follow the coast pretty closely, thinking there 



