322 CONQUERING THE ARCTIC ICE 



in order to give him a fitting burial, as up there they had 

 neither wood for a coffin nor calico for a shroud. We were 

 greatly startled by the idea of an outbreak of typhoid fever 

 among the natives, who have not the slightest notion of 

 sanitation and do not understand the meaning of the word 

 <c infectious." We have explained to them very carefully what 



will happen if they do not follow our 

 directions, but they look at us as if 

 to say " Why, we shall get this 

 disease, if it is coming to us, in spite 

 of anything you may do or say." 



We, too, \vere troubled with illness, 

 if only among our dogs. " Bismarck" 

 had died, and so had one of the dogs 

 I bought at Herschel Island ; worse 

 still, Mr. Leffingwell's pet, and the 

 best dog in the team, a dog which is 

 called after a mutual friend of ours, 



Dr. Werner, from the Baldwin Expedition, died on September 10. 

 As I wanted to find a man to accompany me across the moun- 

 tains, I had asked Sachawachick to go east with me in order to 

 speak to a native whom we all valued very much, a young man 

 called Ujarajak. We started on September n in our boat 

 with eight days' food. The first day everything went well, 

 and we were making good headway, but on the next a gale 

 sprang up from the south-west, and we had a very unpleasant 

 time. Of course we wanted to use our boat as much as 

 possible, and as it blew very hard and a high surf was running, 

 we started as soon as we awoke, without waiting to cook our 

 breakfast. But we had hardly left the beach before the 

 strength of the gale increased with leaps and bounds, and the 

 boat shot through the water like an arrow. I was working at the 

 steering oar, to keep the boat before the wind, and Sachawachick 

 was baling with all his might. We were almost wrecked on 

 some shoals which we had never noticed before, but managed 

 to get the boat over, half full of water. Neither Sachawachick 

 nor myself liked the look of things, and when I proposed to try 

 and land he was only too glad, though we ran the risk of losing 

 our outfit in the surf. But it took us three hours to row about 

 two hundred yards, and we had more than once given it up as 



