THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 515 



coming upon the sandy hummock we found on top of some ice 

 that was two years old or over, a gravel and boulder ridge eighteen 

 paces long. At its highest point it was about five feet higher than 

 the ice on which it rested and had an average width of between 

 ten and fifteen feet. The ridge was composed of mud, gravel, 

 slate and boulders, the largest weighing over a hundred pounds. 

 Some lumps of soil with lichens I took to show that it had been 

 formed by a landslide from some steep and not entirely barren 

 land. Apart from this earth ridge, the ice was a perfectly ordi- 

 nary old floe. It was now lying thirty or forty miles from the 

 nearest land and the depth of water underneath it was probably 

 over thirty fathoms, although we were unable to sound right at 

 that point; no sounding we got in the vicinity showed less than 

 twenty-six fathoms. 



While it seemed obvious that this earth ridge had been formed 

 by a landslide descending on ice lying near a precipitous coast, 

 this could not have happened on any land with which I am person- 

 ally familiar, except possibly on the north or south coasts of Banks 

 Island and both these are so far away from our present location 

 that it is not likely they can have been the source. I concluded at 

 the time that this ice had been lying a year or two ago up against 

 the coast either of some undiscovered land or else some precipitous 

 portion of the Sverdrup islands to the east. I have since found on 

 reading Sverdrup's account of Hell Gate * that the slide may very 

 well have occurred on the southwest corner of Ellesmere Island. 

 Certainly the new land which we were presently to discover appears 

 to contain no cliffs given to landslides. This and other similar 

 mud heaps found by us on the ice in the vicinity, probably show 

 that the general current is westward from Jones Sound, taking the 

 ice eventually into the Beaufort Sea and starting it on its probably 

 circuitous route south, then west and thus around the polar basin, 

 eventually to melt in the Gulf Stream north of Iceland and Norway, 

 which seems to be the fate of most of the old polar ice. If the cur- 

 rent be assumed to be the opposite— that is, running into Jones 

 Sound from the west instead of out of it — these mud heaps must 

 have come from some hitherto undiscovered land in the north or 

 west. 



The day before we found the large gravel ridge, we camped on 

 ice where bushels of small shells were heaped on the pressure ridges. 

 It seemed there must be a deposit of these on the sea bottom which 



*"New Land," Vol. I, pp. 340 ff. 



