THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 597 



of the men had expressed their intention of taking the law into their 

 own hands and sailing south for this reason, for they did not propose 

 to work another year without wages. 



I am not telling these things for facts but merely to illustrate 

 the frame of mind people get into in the isolation of the North. 

 The latter two and more remarkable of the four theories were not 

 based upon anything that had happened in Melville Island but 

 rested on talk at the Bear the previous year. It is in the idleness 

 of a ship in winter quarters that such stories grow up. In Melville 

 Island we were far too busy to invent anything so elaborate, al- 

 though there was time enough in the winter darkness to speculate 

 on what was already in our minds. 



There were many articles of equipment on the Bear which we 

 needed badly and in which the Bernier cache had disappointed 

 us. Nothing had rejoiced us so much as the kerosene and the lan- 

 tern, but the kerosene proved not half as much in quantity as we 

 had thought and the quality was extraordinarily poor. There are 

 stories from the early explorers of kerosene becoming white and 

 thick with the winter frost and these are true, for in those days the 

 processes of refining petroleum were not well understood. I had 

 thought that such oil was a matter of history, but in the case of 

 the Bernier oil it was now a matter of painful experience. 



On one occasion when the temperature was around sixty below 

 zero the kerosene could not be poured out of a jug that had a mouth 

 fully an inch in diameter. In the lanterns it burned badly and in 

 our primus stoves it clogged and would not burn at all. A blue- 

 flame kerosene stove has great advantages over the Eskimo method 

 of cooking with tallow or animal oils, and quantities of kerosene 

 were on the Bear. Seal oil is entirely satisfactory for heating 

 snowhouses, which is another matter, but the lamp for heating 

 will take two or three hours to cook a meal which a primus stove 

 could bring to a boil in half an hour. Except for the thought that 

 the Bear must be wrecked and unable to help us, we should have 

 felt rather bitter against her during this winter, struggling need- 

 lessly along in darkness without kerosene enough to be able to 

 afford lantern light for the man who walked ahead to pick trail. 



