444 FIELD WOEK OF THE PEARY ARCTIC CLUB, 1898-1902. 



Another strip of young- ice gave us a passage nearly across Mascart 

 Inlet until, under Cape Payer, I found it so broken up that two of the 

 sledges and nearly all of the dogs got into the water before we could 

 escape from it. Then a pocket of snow, thigh and waist deep, over 

 rul)ble ice under the lee of the cape stalled us completel}-. 1 pitched 

 the tent, fastened the dogs, and we devoted the rest of the da}' to 

 stamping a road through the snow with our snowshoes. Even then, 

 when we started the next day, I was obliged to put two teams to one 

 sledge in order to move it. 



Cape Pa3'er was a hard proposition. The first half of the distance 

 round it we were obliged to cut a road, and on the last half, with 12 

 dogs and 3 men to each sledge to push and pull them, snow-plow fash- 

 ion, through the deep snow. 



Distant Cape was almost equally inhospitable, and it was onl}' after 

 long and careful reconnoissance that we were able to get our sledges 

 past along- the narrow crest of the huge ridge of ice_ forced up against 

 the rocks. After this we had comparativelj' fair going on past Cape 

 Ramsay, Dome Cape, and across Meigs Fiord as far as Mary Murray 

 Island. Then came some heavy going, and at 11.40 p. m. of May 8 

 we reached Lockwood's cairn on the north end of Lockwood Island. 

 From this cairn I took the record and thermometer deposited there by 

 Lockwood eighteen years before. The record was in a perfect state 

 of preservation. 



One march from here carried us to Cape Washington. Just at mid- 

 night we reached, the low point, which is visible from Lockwood Island, 

 and great was mj' relief to see, on rounding this point, another splendid 

 headland, with two magnificent glaciers debouching near it, rising 

 across an intervening* inlet. I knew now that Cape Washington was 

 not the northern point of Greenland, as 1 had feared. It would have 

 been a great disappointment to me, after coming so far, to find that 

 another's eyes had forestalled mine in looking- first upon the coveted 

 northern point. 



Nearly all m}- hours for sleep at this camp were taken up by obser- 

 vations and a round of angles. The ice north from Cape Washington 

 was in a frightful condition, utterly impractical )le. Leaving Cape 

 Washington, we crossed the mouth of the fiord, packed with blue-top 

 floe bergs, to the western edge of one of the big glaciers, and then over 

 the extremity of the glacier itself, camping near the edge of the second. 

 Here I found myself in the midst of the birthplace of the '"floe bergs," 

 which could be seen in all the various stages of formation. These 

 floe bergs are merel}^ degraded icebergs — that is, bergs of low alti- 

 tude, detached from the extremity of a glacier, which has for some 

 distance been forcing its way along a comparatively level and shallow 

 sea bottom. 



