THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 145 



the accident to Captain Bernard. He had arrived at Collinson Point 

 several days after we left there and, although told he could prob- 

 ably not catch up, he pluckily started after us, tired as he was from 

 the long trip from Barrow. Unfortunately he had no means of 

 knowing how badly we needed the sled he had been using, so he 

 left it at Collinson Point for a lighter one with which he pushed 

 on to Crawford's camp at the Ulahula mouth. Here Crawford had 

 joined him to help him on till he overtook us. The morning of 

 March 23 when we had, as we thought, left all communication with 

 land behind, he arrived at our camp while we were still asleep to 

 give us the Barrow mail and beg for a chance to go along. Later 

 it was he who volunteered to take the 14 stitches that were neces- 

 sary to close the Captain's wound. And a good job he made of it. 



Once more we were ready and fortune was against us. In an 

 ordinary arctic winter the last two weeks of March should have 

 an average temperature of twenty or thirty degrees below zero, 

 but from the 20th to the 30th of that March we had weather that 

 seldom went down to zero and occasionally almost up to the thaw- 

 ing point. The ice outside the six-mile wide land floe, which had 

 been broken up by the gale of the 17th, was now no longer subject 

 to strong currents and was moving very sluggishly. It could have 

 been set fast and firm by a single night of good frost. But this 

 good frost refused to come. 



Just what moving sea ice is like may interest the general reader. 

 A certain amount of ice in winter is frozen fast to the beach, and 

 in some cases for a few hundred yards and in other cases several 

 miles is grounded solidly upon a shallow bottom. But as you pro- 

 ceed away from land you come to what we call the "floe," or place 

 where the edge of the shelf frozen fast to the land meets the moving 

 pack. When the pack is in rapid motion, as after a severe gale, its 

 speed on the north coast of Alaska may be as much as two miles 

 an hour, rarely a little more. The ice masses are of all sizes and 

 all thicknesses. When a heavy floe moves along the edge of the 

 land ice in such a way as to rub against it, we say that the pack is 

 "grinding." Sometimes this is a terrific phenomenon. Instead of 

 a description of my own, I shall borrow one from the diary of Mc- 

 Connell who now saw it for the first time. 



"In the afternoon the Chief and his right-hand man, Mr. Stor- 

 kerson, went over to the lead, and when he returned he told Wilkins 

 and me that we could see a sight worth seeing by walking over there, 

 but not to go too near the edge. It was a magnificent and awe- 

 inspiring sight that met our eyes. The whole field on the other side 



