APPENDIX 699 



ordinary smokeless and odorless Eskimo lamps and wicks, but later 

 when the weather got warmer so that we did not need the heat in our 

 tent, the lamps were abandoned and our cooking was done outside. A 

 fireplace was made out of a five-gallon kerosene can, placing two small 

 iron bars on top of it on which the pots rested. It was a quick method 

 of preparing a meal but available outdoors only because of the smoke 

 and odor. 



OUR FLOATING HOME 



The floe at the northern edge of which our camp was situated and 

 on which we drifted through the summer of 1918 from the 8th of 

 April to the 9th of October, can best be described as a large island of 

 ice about seven miles wide and at least 15 miles long. This latter 

 estimate is less than the real length of the floe but I say 15 miles because 

 I only explored 15 miles of it. It may have been 30 miles long for all 

 I know. In relation to the smaller surrounding floes it acted exactly 

 as land does. The smaller floes would be more afi"ected by the winds 

 and would drift faster back and forth, depending on the direction of 

 the winds. This fact was of great advantage to us in that with west 

 wind we would have open water to the east. The smaller floes would 

 drift away from the point at which we had our camp. With east wind 

 the small ice on the west side would drift to the west, so we nearly always 

 had open water in which to hunt seals. 



From an elevation close by our camp the panorama presenting 

 itself impressed me exactly as that of a certain kind of land. The 

 color of course was the bluish white of ice but the contour of the hills, 

 the ridges and the levels in between and in which numerous small 

 lakes and ponds were visible, was exactly like certain stretches of prairie 

 I have seen in the midwestern United States and Canada. This simi- 

 larity of old ice to land is well known. 



The thickness of the ice at our camp, judging by the amount of it 

 visible above the level of the sea, I should say would be about 50 or 

 60 feet. This extraordinary thickness was just local and the average 

 of the whole floe naturally would be much less, probably less than 20 

 feet. 



THE GAME WE SAW 



Before the return of the second support party when we still were 

 only 150 miles from the nearest land, numbers of snow buntings came 

 to visit us. In the summer when we were drifting between the latitude 

 of 73° and 74° North, a number of lapland longspurs were seen. In 

 the first part of May and the latter part of August a number of dif- 

 ferent species of salt water ducks were seen — the king eider, the old 

 squaw, and the surf scoter, the first going to the northeast and then 



