THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 635 



for in the clear spells land and land sky showed to the northwest 

 but none to the west or southwest. Apparently we were traveling 

 into a deep bay with a peninsula on our right. We could scarcely 

 reconcile this with the map, but so it must be. Next day we trav- 

 eled twelve miles in a direction ten or fifteen degrees south of west 

 and the situation became more difficult to understand, for now the 

 land was plain and not far away on the right while ahead was no 

 land nor even land sky. On the theory that this was a bay, it 

 was getting to be an extraordinarily deep one. 



With all our experience of the inaccuracy of polar maps, we 

 were yet counting the land to the north of us as a peninsula and 

 expecting any moment to find land to the west, when on July 

 25th, after traveling eight miles farther, we camped half a mile 

 from land. So far as the evidence of our eyes could show, we 

 were opposite the most southerly point. It was a fine sunshiny 

 day and we should have liked very much to go ashore, but a quar- 

 ter of a mile of open water lay between. It must have been very 

 warm on the land for it was warm enough on the ice for one 

 mosquito to fly out and pay us a visit. Only Charlie saw him 

 but Charlie is familiar enough with mosquitoes to make the identi- 

 fication certain. I was willing to take his word for it, for I have 

 confessed to a prejudice against mosquitoes. They are bad enough 

 in certain settled portions of the country where half a dozen are 

 likely to find their way in the night through a window into your 

 bedroom. But in the Arctic in the vicinity of the circle they are 

 a veritable plague such as no one can conceive who has not been 

 there. When you get five hundred miles within the circle they are, 

 however, no worse than in New Jersey or Missouri and it is prob- 

 able that they are never seriously troublesome in any of the Ca- 

 nadian islands more than 500 miles north of the arctic circle. 



After two days of continued traveling west we were compelled 

 to go two miles southwest to cross a lead running in that direction ; 

 then we traveled northwest nine miles and the situation was at 

 last clear. We had passed the west end of an island and the land 

 all lay to the northeast. The great King Christian's Land of 

 Sverdrup's map and the Admiralty chart does not exist. In clear 

 weather, from the tops of the highest ice hummocks, no land could 

 be seen to the west, to the northwest, southwest or south, or indeed 

 in any direction except the northeast. We did see indications of 

 land to the north, possibly a small new island, though we took it to 

 be the "loom" of Ellef Ringnes Island far to the north. 



This shows how much safer it would have been for Isachsen to 



