596 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



took this watch apart and put the spring into the broken chronom- 

 eter. To do such a job is one thing but to do it well is another 

 and we had little hope at first that we would get a satisfactory- 

 timepiece. Immediately when the watch was running we took a 

 star observation and then compared the repaired timepiece day by 

 day with the other, in which, however, we had little confidence. 

 A delay of a week or ten days was imperative to get several time 

 observations, at the end of which we were almost astounded to 

 find that the watch seemed to have as steady a rate as ever, al- 

 though naturally a quite different one. Of the many useful things 

 Storkerson did for the expedition this was one of the most im- 

 portant. 



During the winter we had speculated on what had happened 

 to the Bear and there were probably a dozen theories or variations 

 of theories as to why we had not heard from her. Observations 

 of Storkerson's party from Cape Ross had indicated that Melville 

 Sound had been open during the latter part of summer and we 

 thought that a ship could have come through, so it seemed most 

 reasonable that she had been wrecked in the early spring, probably 

 just at the time of the break-up in Prince of Wales Straits. An- 

 other theory was that while Melville Sound had been open, Prince 

 of Wales Straits might have been closed, and that the ship was 

 now lying at Armstrong Point, for her orders had been that if she 

 could not come north she was to stay where she was. 



Some of the men stated that before they left the Bear the pre- 

 vious winter they had heard plans being made for spending the 

 coming winter in Walker Bay on Minto Inlet where the caribou 

 hunting and "salmon" fishing were both excellent and where there 

 were plenty of Eskimos for company. All our people were either 

 Eskimos or white men used to wintering where there were plenty 

 of Eskimos, and it was easy to see that this would be to their 

 minds an ideal wintering place. I took little stock in this explana- 

 tion of the non-appearance of the Bear, however, since Storkerson's 

 verbal report and Wilkins' letter had both said that the officers and 

 crew were anxious to bring the ship to Melville Island. The talk 

 went on that there had been a rumor that I was keeping the expedi- 

 tion north against the orders of the Government and some of the 

 men now thought that the officers of the Bear, relying on this rumor, 

 had sailed south to "civilization," counting on Government ap- 

 proval. A variation of this story had it that some one on the 

 expedition had received direct information from the Government 

 that nobody's wages would be paid, and it was said that several 



