THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 601 



with four teams started for Cape Grassy. Emiu and I remained 

 behind to get an additional star observation for rating our watches. 

 Two good ones were secured on the 4th. further confirming that 

 our repaired watch was maintaining a steady rate, and the 5th 

 we started to overtake Storkerson, leaving the camp in charge 

 of Gonzales. He and Lopez were to get some coal, for the supply 

 dug in the fall had nearly given out, and some ovibos meat, for 

 that also was running low. The mining would not be easy, for, 

 unlike the Grassy coal vein, the vein that Storkerson's camp 

 relied on was only a few inches thick, embedded now in frozen 

 earth. We traveled rapidly and overtook Storkerson at Hooper 

 Island where he had been stormbound for a day. 



It was on the whole rather difficult work. We soon found 

 that we had made a mistake in taking the dogs brought by Gon- 

 zales, as most of them were tired and as they were of the small 

 Eskimo variety, anyway, and hardly able to keep up with the 

 rest even under favorable conditions. The weather was excep- 

 tionally cold, and cold weather increases the hauling weight of 

 loads. At fifty or sixty below zero the grains of snow have 

 angles sharp and hard enough to act upon the steel shoeing of 

 the sledges somewhat as grains of sand would on a beach. It is 

 one of the things that I have wanted to experiment with by "lab- 

 oratory methods" and have neglected, but I suppose that a drop 

 in temperature from ten above zero to fifty below must increase 

 by three the strain put on the dogs in pulling a given load. 



It is said that other metals run more easily than steel over 

 snow at low temperatures, but those who have read the experiences 

 of Sverdrup, Mikkelsen and others with German silver shoeing 

 will know that, even if steel drags harder, it is better in the long 

 run for unless you get tangled in rocky ground it will last half 

 a dozen years while German silver gives out promptly in rough 

 ice. There is only one shoeing I know that is practical besides 

 steel and that is ice, but this cannot be used on sledges of the 

 Nome type nor on sledges of the Nansen and Amundsen type, as 

 commonly used in the Antarctic also, for all these sledges have 

 pliability. To keep ice shoeing, the sled runner must be a stout 

 plank placed on edge, as in the Peary and Eskimo sledges. These 

 are rigid, and ice shoeing will stay on them indefinitely. It needs 

 to be repaired every morning but that is only a few minutes' job 

 with each sled. At fifty below zero the hauling weight of a sled 

 so shod is probably only a quarter or fifth as much as with steel 

 shoeing. The applying and repairing of ice shoeing is easy and 



