THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 629 



the blizzards pile the snow over this cliff into a drift in the lee, 

 so that the depot was probably buried out of sight long before 

 Christmas of the first year. The weight of snow gradually ac- 

 cumulated during the winter but, as the roof seems to have been 

 stoutly braced, it may have withstood the strain until spring. 

 That it should then endure was impossible with any structure of 

 boards and planks, for as the snow became wet and granular with 

 the summer thaws it would press on the roof with the weight of 

 thousands of tons, for the drift there in early spring would not be 

 less than fifty or seventy-five feet in depth. Naturally the roof 

 caved in. When Bernier visited the depot in 1908 he found the 

 roof gone and, not appreciating the reason, he replaced it with a 

 new one which naturally collapsed the following winter. 



When we reached the house that evening we should hardly 

 have found it but for the monument above, which guided us di- 

 rectly. There was only a corner sticking out of the snowbank, 

 although the rivers had been open on Melville Island now for weeks 

 and most of the land was bare of snow. But these were excep- 

 tionally warm days and we could almost see the house creep out 

 of the snowbank, so that by the time we left there was less than 

 a quarter of it still buried. 



We were greatly interested to find out the condition of the 

 depot and examined it as the snow receded. There seemed to have 

 been three layers of casks over much of the floor. Most of the 

 casks in the upper layer have been broken. Those containing 

 flour seem to have burst through expansion of the contents when 

 moisture soaked in through the wood. Still, we found some flour 

 barrels that had not been broken and one of these we opened. 

 The flour inside was naturally dark, for in 1850 when it was 

 ground in England the modern process of making white flour had 

 npt yet been discovered. It was dry but so hard we had to pry 

 it out in chunks with our hunting knives. Pieces of it could, how- 

 ever, be powdered between finger and thumb. It had a sour smell 

 not very different from that of a can of yeast. The rest of us 

 were not inclined to make bread of it but Emiu said he was 

 hungry for hot cakes and so we let him try. Somewhat to our 

 surprise, the sour smell disappeared entirely in the cocking and 

 the pancakes proved excellent. 



Particularly we looked for sugar. After some search we found 

 a barrel marked "Sugar," but on being opened it was found to 

 contain unsweetened chocolate in cartwheels, varying in thick- 

 ness from an inch and a half to more than two inches and about 



