STEFANSSON-AXDERSON ARCTIC EXPEDITION 67 



THE STEFANSSON-ANDERSON ARCTIC EXPEDITION. 



LATE in Fel)ruaiy, a welcome letter was received from Mr. 

 ^'ihljalmi Stefansson, who, together with Dr. R. M. Anderson, 

 was sent bv the ]\Iuseimi last summer to make ethnological, 

 geograpical and biological studies along the arctic coast of North America 

 in the vicinity of the mouth of the Mackenzie River. Mr. Stefansson 

 writes as follows: 



"Cape Halkett, Alaska, Sept. 25th, 1908. 



"On my way east along the coast I have just come upon Capt. William 

 Mogg's vessel, the "Olga," frozen in the ice oif shore at Halkett. [Long. 

 152° W.] The captain will abandon his ship next Tuesday. ***** 



"I have not my diary with me — it is at our camp on shore and I am at 

 Capt. Mogg's ship three miles off shore in the ice — so I cannot give exact 

 dates, but we left Point Barrow about August 29th or 30th. We had head 

 winds and foggy weather and finally froze in [at] Smith Bay September 6th — 

 very bad luck; some years boating is good till October 1st or after. We 

 could do nothing but prepare safe caches on shore for our stuff until the ice 

 was strong enough for sled travel September 18th, when we started east. 

 W^e soon came to weaker ice, however, and had to delay and go slowly, so 

 we are only this far by now, but hope for better traveling. 



"Dr. Anderson I suppose to be safe either at Barter Island or inland 

 from there, looking for deer and mountain sheep. I hope we shall be down 

 to him in some 10 days from now. All we shall bring, however, is tobacco 

 and matches, for we had only four dogs with us, and succeeded in making 

 only an indifferent sled out of driftwood. If we fail in hunting and fishing 

 to the eastward we shall probably — some of us at least — retreat upon our 

 cache in Smith's Bay and be able to turn a penny trapping while we eat up 

 the flour, etc. — for it is an excellent fox country, though there are no 

 people, because there are no food animals. 



"I expect I shall get to Herschel Island in time to write you by the police 

 mail, and you should get the letter about as soon as this one, while I should 

 be able to give in it more information as to ourselves. Seeing, however, that 

 one of our whaleboats is frozen in so far west, I hope, among other things, 

 that we can get together a good collection — perhaps several himdred skulls 

 — of bones from the ancient graveyards along the sandspit between Point 

 Tangent and Point Barrow. I saw over a hundred (on top the ground) in a 

 walk through one of them when we were ashore in a calm coming east. We 

 shall also almost certainly be able to do some good digging on the island just 



