GREELY'S CAMPING-GROUND. 91 



After the ship had sunk, the crew did not consider themselves 

 to be under command, and instead of helping to save the pro- 

 visions and bring them ashore, most of them began to plunder 

 the vessel. Might, if not right, was on their side, and, 

 altogether, only a fraction of the plentiful supplies which had 

 been brought up were cached on Cape Sabine and in other 

 places. 



The net result of these relief expeditions, therefore, was that 

 from July, 1882, to August, 1883, fifty thousand rations were taken 

 up through Smith Sound. Of these, a thousand rations were de- 

 posited in various places, while the remainder were brought back 

 again, or went to the bottom in the ' Proteus.' 



In August, 1883, Greely, with his four boats, of which one 

 was a steam-launch, came down through Kane Basin, picking up 

 the caches on his way ; but all along the coast of Ellesmere Land 

 he looked in vain for the crews and provisions of the relief ex- 

 peditions, until his attempts at landing were prevented by storms 

 and drift-ice. After losing two of his boats, however, he reached 

 land at last, at Cape Isabella. From thence, unfortunately, he 

 chose to follow Ellesmere Land northwards again, because it had 

 been agreed that on Brevoort Island he should find news of the 

 depots. If, instead of doing this, he had gone across to the coast 

 of Greenland, he would have found a certain quantity of 

 provisions on Littleton Island, and have had a comparatively 

 short distance to inhabited parts, and a still shorter way to 

 Foulke Fjord, which is one of the best places for game in these 

 tracts. 



The news of the foundering of the ' Proteus,' which Greely found 

 at Brevoort Island, was a hard blow for the bold explorer ; but 

 in reality it was only the beginning of the tragedy which was 

 played during the next nine months upon the barren island in the 

 Arctic Ocean, a tragedy which vies in horror with the most 

 terrible of the accounts of the martyrdom of Arctic travellers. 



In a house of stones, with their last boat for a roof, they 

 dragged out a hopeless winter of starvation. A few seals, a few 

 foxes, in the month of April a small bear, and a kind of sand-flea, 

 which they themselves called ' shrimps,' were the only additions 



