434 POLAR PROBLEMS 



corner of a heavy piece of ice to a hard opposite corner, hitting her 

 on the turn of the bow, which is Hable to cripple her. In going astern 

 the rudder always should be amidships. When bucking ice it is better 

 to start her astern full speed. Then, as she gathers way, go slow astern. 

 This has the effect of enabling the steam in the boiler to rise, so that 

 when she comes ahead for the next butt she will have a good head of 

 steam to help her break her way through the bar ahead. With hand 

 gear the wheel chains are always racked going astern. It is dangerous 

 in going astern not to leave the racking on the chains, for a man is 

 likely to have his leg or arm broken or be thrown clean over the wheel 

 should the rudder strike the ice in going astern or get a side clip either 

 going astern or ahead. One has to exercise great caution in going 

 astern. The officer on the bridge must be trained and skilled to watch 

 every movement. As a rule I am aloft myself and come down only 

 if I have a very competent man to take my place. One has to be 

 tireless to move a ship through ice. The ice movements themselves 

 may be very quick, and a few minutes lost may put one a long way 

 astern. Patience, again, is a great virtue. The first thing is to keep 

 your ship free. When she is free you can go where the breaks occur; 

 if caught in the ice you are powerless and have to go where the ice 

 brings you, but free you can take the first favorable opportunity or 

 leads that open in the direction you want to go. 



W^e were lucky in the Roosevelt not to have any naval or govern- 

 ment restrictions. We had no insurance. She was registered in the 

 New York Yacht Club — no underwriters, no Board of Trade. I had 

 a British master's ticket, but she was an American yacht. So it 

 didn't matter. The thing was to get her to Cape Sheridan or Porter 

 Bay, Grant Land. We took a big chance leaving Etah so heavily 

 laden that the deck was almost in the water. She looked like a musk- 

 rat swimming, only both ends above water, stem and stern. That 

 was her condition in 1905 and again in 1908. She couldn't rise on 

 the ice when in that heavy state if caught between floes. In that 

 case she must have gone under in a short time. We couldn't help 

 ourselves in 1905, for we had two years' provisions and a deck load 

 of dogs and Eskimo whale and walrus meat. She burned twenty-five 

 to thirty tons of coal in twenty-four hours of hard steaming. Ten 

 days of hard steaming would make a big hole in our coal supply. 

 Then there was the long winter and the return the following year. 

 No sealing captain would think of loading his ship so deep or handling 

 her as roughly as I did the Roosevelt. 



Much of the ice we encountered going up Smith Sound, Kane 

 Basin, Kennedy and Robeson Channels came from the Polar Basin, 

 some of it the paleocrystic ice, which really is the ice foot or glacial 

 fringe along the Grant Land coast. Then there is the ice that has 

 formed in the Polar Basin and been held there for years and is at 



