CHAPTER VI 



THE KARLUK DISAPPEARS 



WHEN our hunting party left the ship we expected to be ab- 

 sent from it only a week or two.* We had already made 

 up our minds as to which were the best dogs, and we took 

 instead of them two teams of untried and presumably poor dogs, with 

 the idea of testing these out. We had ten or eleven good new sledges 

 and chose two old and comparatively poor ones, believing we had 

 better not expose the sledges intended for ice exploration to chance 

 injury. Wilkins, whose work and pleasure alike was photography, 

 left all his equipment on the ship except the lightest camera. I had a 

 specially good rifle, presented to me by the Harvard Travelers 

 Club of Boston, which I had promised to use on all important trips. 

 I left this rifle aboard and took an ordinary one. Two or three 

 weeks earlier, when the creaking of the ship had led me to think 

 we might have to leave her at any moment, I had put thirteen hun- 

 dred dollars of paper money into my hip pocket so as not to 

 forget it in an emergency. Now I took this out of my pocket and 

 put it into the strong box in my cabin, along with more than a 

 hundred pounds in weight of silver and gold money which we carried 

 for trade with the Alaska and Herschel Island Eskimos. 



It was about ten miles ashore. We did not go the whole dis- 

 tance the first day (September 20), partly because we did not 

 start till the afternoon, partly because there was no hurry, and in a 

 measure because the young ice between the old ice floes was still 

 treacherous and had to be dealt with carefully. In addition to 

 the white men I had taken along the Point Hope Eskimos, Asat- 

 siak and Pauyurak. 



Camp was made in two tents, three men in one, and myself 

 with the two Eskimos in the other. I had made such camps 

 hundreds of times so that to me it was scarcely an event, but it 

 interested me because it gave me my first idea of how my traveling 

 companions were going to take to what to them was a new sort 

 of life. Here I quote from a magazine article written by Wilkins: 



*See "Last Voyage of the Karluk," p. 36. 



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