176 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



Antarctic whom we could hire, as did Peary, to make snowhouses 

 for us." Sir Leopold McClintock was one of the first, if not the 

 first, of polar explorers to point out that snowhouses are so com- 

 fortable that their use would make arctic exploration a simpler, 

 safer and pleasanter occupation ; but he went on to say that unfor- 

 tunately white men cannot make them, and that he himself did 

 the next best thing by erecting vertical walls of snow and roofing 

 them over with a tarpaulin. He comments on the inferiority of 

 this dwelling to the real snowhouses, but insists that it is greatly 

 superior to the regulation tent. While it is odd that McClintock 

 should be so far behind the Eskimos with whom he associated, 

 in that he could not build the houses which they built with ease, 

 it is also notable that so far as white men were concerned, he was 

 a generation ahead of his time in realizing their value. Any one 

 who tries it will agree with him that snow walls with a tarpaulin 

 roof make a much better camp than the silk tents used by most 

 explorers down to the present time. 



Following the idea that while snowhouses are excellent camps 

 they are a sort of racial property of the Eskimos, Charles Francis 

 Hall was comfortable in them as a guest of the Eskimos but never 

 learned how to build one. The like was true of Schwatka and 

 Gilder and later of Hanbury. Peary used them for years as built 

 for him by the Eskimos, but it does not appear to have occurred 

 to him to learn to build one. So it was curiously reserved for us 

 to be the first explorers to build our own snowhouses for field use.* 

 We have found by experience that an ordinarily adaptable man 

 can learn snowhouse-building in a day. 



If four men cooperate in the building of a snowhouse, one 

 usually cuts the blocks, a second carries them, a third is inside build- 

 ing, and the fourth follows the builder around and chinks in all the 

 crevices between the blocks with soft snow. In ten minutes the 

 soft snow in the crevices has become harder than the blocks them- 

 selves, so that the house, although fragile in process, is moderately 

 strong within half an hour. 



When the snow dome has been otherwise finished, a tunnel is 

 dug through the drift into the house, giving a sort of trap door 

 entrance through the floor. Most Eskimos, failing to understand 

 certain principles of thermodynamics, use a door in the side of the 



* So far as I know, the first explorer who took steps to have his men learn 

 snowhouse building was Amundsen at King William Island. Two of his men 

 took lessons one or two days, but the expedition does not seem later to have 

 made use of whatever skill they acquired. 



