THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 463 



stores wanted by us on the early stages of our New Land survey. 

 Having the Star so far north we planned to depend on her supplies 

 for man and dog food to take us up to about the first of April. 

 When you have plenty of sledges and dogs at a base well supplied 

 with condensed foods such as pemmican, and fuel such as kerosene 

 or alcohol, time can be saved by depending on these rather than 

 hunting in the case of operations within about two hundred miles 

 of the base where no delaying for scientific work on the way is 

 necessary. The ideal way then is to combine the condensed food 

 method with the method of living off the country. You start out 

 with your sledges loaded with food, and before that you have 

 made, during the darkness when real traveling is not convenient, 

 depots ahead in the direction you are going. When the light is 

 sufficient, perhaps in February, you start traveling steadily, never 

 delaying to hunt until food and fuel are nearly or quite at an end. 

 The journey can then be extended indefinitely by transferring 

 from condensed food rations to game. 



By the 10th of February we began to expect Storkerson and by 

 the 20th we were concerned because he had not arrived. The es- 

 sential of a journey northwest from the Gore Islands was a start 

 a month or six weeks earlier than ours of the previous year. Other- 

 wise it would be better to concentrate all our efforts upon the 

 vicinity of the newly discovered land, for mapping and other scien- 

 tific work on the straits and enclosed seas between the arctic 

 islands can be carried on well into the summer, whereas traveling on 

 the moving ice should be finished in May and preferably in April. 



I had decided to spend the next winter in Melville Island or 

 farther north whether our ships could get there or not. It has 

 always been one of only two or three serious privations that with 

 our system of long sledge journeys we are separated from our sup- 

 ply bases much longer than ordinary explorers and are therefore 

 compelled to do without books to read. On my first expedition 

 I carried five books wherever I went; complete India paper edi- 

 tions of Byron, Shelley, Heine's poems in German, a volume of 

 Icelandic poems, and Quain's "Anatomy." On my second expedi- 

 tion I had most of the standard books written about the Eski- 

 mos, whether in English, Danish or German. On the present ex- 

 pedition there was a thoughtfully selected and extensive library 

 on both the Karluk and the Alaska, together with a general jum- 

 ble of books presented to us. On each ship we had the new 

 Britannica presented by its publishers, a hundred books, mainly 

 scientific, presented by The Macmillan Company, and a hundred 



