614 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



At first I did not recognize the illness but noted merely a sluggish- 

 ness and quarrelsomeness which was entirely foreign to Noice, at 

 any rate, whom I knew from the previous year. They complained 

 of numerous things, including the vanity of polar exploration and 

 the general foolishness of doing hard work to no purpose. Later 

 they came to me with a definite complaint that the food, the amount 

 of which I had set when I realized we were in a sea desert, might 

 be enough in quantity but there was something wrong with the 

 quality, for they had never felt so "rotten" before. 



Now I questioned them closely about the previous winter, 

 whereupon I learned the facts which made clear the condition that 

 had been so mysterious in Charlie's case. It was scurvy that he 

 had and these men were getting it, too, and with good cause. 



It seems that when the dilapidated sledges went to Winter 

 Harbor the men agreed among themselves that while living on 

 meat was all right when you had to, there was no need to do so now. 

 They considered entirely unreasonable my order that they were 

 to eat ovibos meat every day irrespective of what other food they 

 had, and their resentment carried them to the other extreme. They 

 confessed that "just for spite" they sometimes refrained from eat- 

 ing meat when they would really have preferred it. The dietetic 

 regulation had been carried out in about the spirit of schoolboys 

 who do things for no other reason than that they have been told 

 they must not do them. 



On approaching Winter Harbor the party had seen a large 

 herd of ovibos and when Storkerson had wanted it killed, they 

 begged off on the ground that there was plenty of pork and other 

 things in Bernier's cache. While repairing the sleds they had lived 

 on the Bernier groceries and had even fed the dogs with them, so 

 that when they were ready to leave they had lowered the supply 

 to the point where they could haul almost all the remainder with 

 them and this they did. We had traveled northward from Liddon 

 Gulf in two parties, with Charlie and Noice members of the one 

 where I was not. On this section they had eaten nothing but 

 groceries and a little dried ovibos meat, which probably has no 

 antiscorbutic value, anyway. By the time I caught up to them 

 at the floe edge they had been three months on this diet, which 

 is long enough to bring on scurvy, as experience has repeatedly 

 shown. 



If Charlie had told me these facts I should have diagnosed his 

 case directly. Now there was no doubt about Noice, who was a 

 ^ood deal worse than Knight, for Knight had been eating a certain 



