362 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



vere small, about the ordinary Eskimo size. They were consequently 

 weak, so that they could not carry more than from fifteen to thirty 

 pounds, and so short-legged that they dragged in the water whatever 

 they carried. We accordingly made a sled for these dogs to pull, 

 out of the front halves of our pair of skis. 



The five days we were in camp at Mercy Bay we supposed that 

 McClure's ship and depot had been near his monument and it sur- 

 prised us to find no remains there beyond half an armful of broken 

 barrel staves and the bent and rusted bottom of one small tin can. 

 On July 20th, our observations and preparations finished, we started 

 south, and discovered that the depot must have been about a mile 

 south of the monument. Here was an oval pile of coal, perhaps 

 six or eight tons. At first sight it looked very much like a mound 

 of dark earth, heavily overgrown with grass. Lying about were 

 hundreds and perhaps thousands of barrel staves, broken or whole. 

 A few of these had been split but bore no other sign of having been 

 worked up. Neither did we find any indication of Eskimo work 

 on any other piece of hard wood. There were endless quantities of 

 adze chips and knife shavings, but all were from soft wood, thus 

 confirming the story I had picked up in Prince Albert Sound of the 

 Eskimos using the soft wood and disregarding the hard. These 

 Eskimos had told me also that when they last visited Mercy Bay 

 there were left only two or three pieces of iron so heavy that they 

 did not know how to utilize them. This also was confirmed by our 

 finding only two pieces of iron, one an ice anchor and the other a 

 grappling hook, both too heavy for working by any method known 

 to the Eskimos. 



Of the tons of food carefully deposited by McClure and later 

 thrown away by the Eskimos no sign remained except one brown 

 heap, perhaps half a bushel. It was soft and had no odor, and I 

 thought it might have been peas or flour, but Thomsen thought 

 there was a slight resemblance to the odor of cheese from the in- 

 terior of the heap. We found leather boots decayed until the leather 

 broke like cardboard. But what interested me most was the degree 

 of weathering of the oldest adze chips and shavings. This corre- 

 sponded, it seemed to me, to the weathering of shavings found by 

 us the previous year at the Eskimo campsites on the west coast 

 of Banks Island, and meant that most of these campsites dated from 

 the period just after the Investigator depot had been discovered, 

 say 1855 to 1860. This confirmed the estimate previously made 

 that few if any of the campsites we saw were over a hundred years 



