24 MY ARCTIC JOURNAL 



I reached him before any one else, and found him standing on 

 one foot looking pale as death. " Don't be frightened, dear- 

 est ; I have hurt my leg," was all he said. Mr. Gibson and 

 Dr. Sharp helped, or rather carried, him down into the cabin 

 and laid him on the table. He was ice-cold, and while I 

 covered him with blankets, our physicians gave him whisky, 

 cut off his boot, and cut open his trousers. They found that 

 both bones of the right leg had been fractured between the 

 knee and the ankle. The leg was put into a box and padded 

 with cotton. The fracture being what the doctors pronounced 

 a " good one," it was not necessary to have the bones pulled 

 into place. Poor Bert suffered agonies in spite of the fact that 

 the doctors handled him as tenderly as they could. We found 

 it impossible to get him into our state-room, so a bed was 

 improvised across the upper end of the cabin, and there my 

 poor sufferer lies. He is as good and patient as it is possible 

 to be under the circumstances. The accident happened in 

 this way. The " Kite " had been for some time pounding, 

 or, as the whalers say, "butting," a passage through the ice, 

 slowly but steadily forging a way through the spongy sheets 

 which had already for upward of a week imprisoned her. 

 To gain strength for every assault it was necessary constantly 

 to reverse, and it was during one of these evolutions, when 

 going astern, that a detached cake of ice struck the rudder, 

 crowding the iron tiller against the wheel-house where Mr. 

 Peary was standing, and against his leg, which it held pinned 

 long enough for him to hear it snap. 



