CHAPTER XLIII 



TROUBLE WITH THE COPPER ESKIMOS 



THE time had come for making preparations for my projected 

 journey to Cape Kellett to visit Captain Bernard and get the 

 sledges he was making. I also hoped to get at Kellett news of 

 Wilkins. If the Star were in Banks Island he would have visited 

 Kellett before now; no news from him would mean that he had 

 crossed McClure Strait to Melville or Prince Patrick Island. Ac- 

 cordingly, I decided to send Captain Gonzales in my place to take 

 our visitors back to their home village in Minto Inlet and to make 

 further purchases there of ethnological specimens. On November 

 2nd they started, Gonzales, Jim Fiji, and Pikalu to make the full 

 trip, and Emiu to go as far as Illun's hunting camp to fetch home 

 some bear meat. 



The evening of that day Storkerson's support party, Charley 

 and Noice, returned. They reported having accompanied Storker- 

 son and Herman to Hornby Point, which was the farthest reached 

 by Wynniatt of McClure's expedition in his exploration of the north 

 coast of Victoria Island. The trip had begun well except that the 

 snow had been soft and the ice rough, making progress rather slow. 

 In Prince of Wales Straits good going could generally be secured by 

 leaving the land and traveling through the middle of the straits. 

 But in crossing Collinson Inlet from Peel Point to Point Hornby 

 much rough ice had been encountered and they were for long 

 stretches compelled to build roads with miners' picks. To the north 

 in Melville Sound they had seen only young ice, indicating that be- 

 fore the freeze-up the sound had been, at least in its southern part, 

 free from winter ice. 



It is upon the basis of similar evidence accumulated during the 

 next two years that I believe Melville Sound is crossable by ordinary 

 ice-going steamers of the whaler or sealer type at least two years out 

 of three. In all probability the Northwest Passage can be made 

 quite as easily by the route originally attempted by McClure and 

 Collinson as by the one actually used by Amundsen. This route 

 may have the disadvantage of a little more ice but it has the ad- 



430 



