CHAPTER XLI 



AUTUMN IN VICTORIA ISLAND 



BY September 21st Haclley had the house finished and every 

 one moved in. Of the two house-building ideas mentioned 

 above, the inward sloping walls and the door in the floor, 

 we had not attempted the low door and the inward slant of the 

 walls had been used with the sides of the houses only and not the 

 ends. This was of little consequence for no sod was obtainable and 

 the walls had to be banked with snow. We found during the winter 

 that enough heat escaped through the boards by conduction to melt 

 a big air space between the snow banking and the board wall, nearly 

 destroying the value of the banking and making this one of the 

 coldest and most disagreeable houses that any of us ever occupied. 

 The condensation of moisture on the inside was so great that 

 streams ran down the walls, masses of ice formed behind the bunks 

 and on the floor, and everything became wet. 



In part this was due to an excessive desire to be clean. So far 

 as I know, few if any polar expeditions before ours have main- 

 tained a liberal supply of water for washing and bathing at base 

 camps situated where no appreciable amount of fuel could be se- 

 cured locally. But we were a very cleanly people, especially the 

 recently civilized Eskimos, with whom it is practically a matter of 

 religion to take a bath once a week. Next to Eskimos sailors are 

 in my experience the most insistent on bathing, for with them as 

 with the Eskimos it has a certain amount of semi-religious signifi- 

 cance — washing and bathing is in part a ceremony. We had only 

 a limited amount of coal and we could furnish Levi with no more 

 than one-twenty-fourth of it per month, for we meant it to last 

 for at least two years. Had this coal been used only for cooking 

 and then burned to make a dry heat for the house, everything 

 could have been kept fairly dry. But such a large amount of 

 ice had to be melted for washing that there was a vessel of ice on 

 the stove nearly all the time, taking up a large part of the heat, 

 and what heat there was consisted chiefly of steam from the cook- 

 ing. Levi told me that some of the Eskimo women used to wash 



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