CHAPTER XXXIII 



THE DISCOVERY OF NEW LAND 



JUNE 17th, after directing the men to proceed straight north 

 all day if traveling conditions allowed, I left camp while they 

 were hitching up the dogs, walked two miles southeast to 

 Cape McClintock, rebuilt the cairn and put in it our record to 

 replace the one we had found. Then I struck north, having pre- 

 viously seen that our teams were already on their northward way 

 to the west of me. 



I walked first to the nearest of McClintock's "Polynia Islands." 

 He has not told us why he named them so. Of itself the name is a 

 monument to one of the respected dead among polar theories. I 

 have heard that the word is of Russian origin and refers to an 

 open water space among ice. But as applied in the polar specula- 

 tion of McClintock's time it signified the open spaces that were 

 thought to exist permanently ice-free in the most northern lati- 

 tudes. The largest of these open spaces was supposed to be around 

 the Pole. There was much high authority back of this idea in 

 the schools and among scientists. Especially there was the weighty 

 German geographer, Petermann. Some even thought they had seen 

 the thing itself and so proved it — for instance, the American ex- 

 plorer Hayes, who made of his observations and beliefs a book 

 called "The Open Polar Sea." 



Walking towards the islands I wondered if McClintock's men 

 had perhaps seen water-sky to the northwest of them and assumed 

 it hung over a "polynia." I could see water-sky in that direction, 

 but I knew it was merely our friend the "shore lead," open now 

 temporarily because of the wind. On the second and largest 

 Polynia Island I must have walked within a hundred yards of 

 one of McClintock's records — I know it now from seeing his diary, 

 but at that time I did not think he would have left one so near 

 to the other which we had already found. 



Beyond the big Polynia Island I had no difficulty in recognizing 

 the "reefs lying to the northward" mentioned in the record we had 

 found and shown on the Admiralty chart we carried. McClintock 



324 



