298 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



and to expose the ice to the sled's weight only. But when they 

 realized that the ice was about to break they began to push the 

 sled with the idea of getting it quickly over to the other side. 

 When both of them took hold of the handle-bars and commenced 

 pushing, the inevitable happened. The sled broke through, after 

 the dogs had landed on the firm ice beyond, but when the front 

 end had barely touched it. Before the ice had fully broken 

 I had hold of the trace of the leading dog and Ole was at the bow. 

 Storkerson and Thomsen escaped falling into the water by letting 

 the sled go, and the stern was immersed while the bow was held 

 against the ice by the combined pull of the dogs, Ole and myself. 

 It was doubtless not much more than a second before we all had 

 our hands on the front end of the sled and not more than two or 

 three till we had it out of the water, but it seemed much longer, 

 and it was certainly long enough for us to visualize what our situa- 

 tion would be if we lost what was on the load. Not a fatal situa- 

 tion necessarily, although we might have had to give up our work 

 for the year at that point. As it was, we had to spend the next 

 two days in camp getting rid of as much as possible of the ice 

 that had formed on the articles that got into the water. 



After the accident we examined the ice, measured every broken 

 piece, and found that at the very thinnest it was five and three- 

 quarters inches thick. The temperature in the shade at the time 

 had been twenty below zero, but the sun was shining on the ice, 

 bringing the temperature upon its surface up to about zero F. 



Long before this we had left the area of shallow soundings 

 and were now traveling over an ocean of unknown depth, for 

 our sounding-wire of 4,500 feet never sufficed to reach bottom. 

 The ice behaved in a peculiar way. When the wind blew from 

 the south or southwest, no matter how hard, it would merely stop 

 moving, or, in the case of an extreme gale, would in the course of 

 a day move a few miles to the north. But whenever there was a 

 calm or when the wind was from the northwest, the north, or the 

 east, the ice kept moving steadily southwest. In other words, a 

 large part of our gain by walking northwest was neutralized by 

 this nearly constant drift to the southwest. By the middle of 

 May we had lost hope of making any notable journey to the north- 

 west that year, for we were only a hundred miles offshore from 

 the Prince Patrick Island coast. 



For a time after reaching this conclusion we tried to travel 

 northeast directly into the teeth of the drift, but we lost as much 

 ground at night as we gained in the daytime, and eventually turned 



I 



