474 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



us we should have fared sumptuously. Where land animals are 

 plentiful one needs no other proof of vegetation, and practically- 

 speaking we have no other, for we made no botanical observations 

 or collections and can only say that the vegetation appeared to be 

 that typical of semi-mountainous land in the Arctic. Nearly every 

 second river valley showed some evidence of coal, and in certain 

 ravines we found outcrops that were several feet thick and appar- 

 ently of fair quality lignite, although the specimens examined were 

 bleached through exposure. In other places it had much the ap- 

 pearance of wood, compressed into bricks and irregular fragments 

 and burned with wood smoke. 



Now I left Alingnak and Lopez with their families to follow 

 behind with the poorest dogs and sledges, their sole task being to 

 reach Melville Island before the break-up of the ice. There seemed 

 no hurry, for caribou and ovibos are at their poorest in early sum- 

 mer and we were not looking forward to as good sealing as they 

 found. The accounts of the British explorers had given us little 

 idea of the comparative abundance of seals, probably for the reason 

 already suggested, that they did not understand the methods of 

 hunting them or the signs by which their presence is revealed. My 

 own party — Wilkins, Natkusiak and Emiu — traveled slowly east 

 along the coast. Castel and Martin had gone ahead to Mercy Bay 

 with the hope of a possible contact with Storkerson. We thought of 

 illness, of accident, and of nearly every explanation except the cor- 

 rect one. 



In writing for Castel his instructions for the advance trip I had 

 before me the Admiralty chart. McClure's ship had wintered two 

 seasons at Mercy Bay, so I felt certain that this vicinity at least 

 would be well mapped. With the greatest confidence I wrote that 

 after rounding Cape McClure, Mercy Bay would be the second 

 great bay encountered. Castel had with him a map from which 

 he expected to recognize the bay without difficulty. 



By March 22nd my party had rounded what we called Cape 

 McClure, although it did not at all resemble the map, and had dis- 

 covered for ourselves that the great bay charted just east of the 

 cape is non-existent, unless you take a bay no more than a mile 

 deep to represent one charted as twenty miles deep, with the bot- 

 tom dotted in to indicate that it might be even deeper. When 

 Castel met us on that day we were prepared for his report, which 

 was that, failing to discover the expected first bay east of Cape 

 McClure, he had traveled about as far as Mercy Bay should be 

 from the Cape and had there found a bay three or four miles wide 



