216 THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 
repeated and emphatic efforts to get north these supplies. The Museum 
files show copies of many letters written by Director Hermon C. Bumpus 
to steam whaling companies, owners of private whalers, captains of freight 
schooners and of United States revenue cutters, and with these letters 
courteous responses bearing negative results. Strange chance it seemed 
that there was no vessel of any sort going to the Far North in the summer of 
1909. The negotiations for shipment of supplies went on between the 
Museum and the West through the winter and early spring. At last it 
transpired that one steamship whaling company of San Francisco, Messrs. 
H. Liebes and Company, would send the freight steamer “Herman” to 
Herschel Island and would carry supplies. That the supplies left San 
Francisco April 24, 1909, however, did not insure their reaching the expedi- 
tion, and if the truth must be told, revealing much in regard to Arctic navi- 
gation, these same supplies, most of which left New York in the fall of 1908, 
and all of which left San Francisco in April, 1909, have not yet reached the 
Museum’s expedition or at least had not done so in late spring of 1910 
when the last letters were sent out. 
The winter on the Colville proved less difficult than had been feared; 
spring came and the main energies of the summer of 1909 were spent in 
getting eastward, with much time lost waiting for whalers which never came. 
Finally Mr. Stefansson succeeded in getting as far east as Cape Parry, near 
enough to the Coppermine for a dash there at the opening of the spring of 
1910 —if the intervening winter could be successfully passed. It is this 
winter in the Cape Parry district that has proved the “hard times” winter 
for the expedition, set forth in the narrative of recent letters. 
We landed, Nat-ku-tji-ak, his wife Pan-ni-gib-luk and I, August 31, by the 
stranded wreck of the steam whaler ‘ Alexander,” lost here in the summer of 1906, 
ten miles east of Cape Parry. Our first object was to find deer, as we were insufhi- 
ciently clothed for the winter and had on hand provisions for about two months only. 
After hunting inland in vain two days, we decided to store most of our stuff in an 
old house built by some Eskimos who pillaged the ‘‘ Alexander’”’, and then proceed to 
Langton Bay to look for deer. We had to transport the things, a little more than a 
boatload, from where they had been landed on the beach to the house, and while we 
were loading the second time a southwest wind suddenly blew up. We made a 
vigorous effort to get to the house, but the beach was rocky there and the surf made 
a landing impossible. We had to run into shelter in a deep fjord cutting southeast 
into the land. The southwester continued and we could not get back to the “‘ Alex- 
ander,” although many articles which we needed badly were there and others a 
handicap to carry were with us in the boat. 
As soon as possible we began edging southwest along the coast, but it was slow 
work. Paddling a big umiak is slow work under any conditions for three people. 
A few days of southwest gales would be separated from a few more days of southwest 
gales by perhaps a half day of calm, but never a breath of fair or land wind. Un- 
fortunately for us we happened to have with us a map of the coast. When on 
