EXCESSIVE BURDEN. 
97 
September we made twenty-four miles with comparar 
tive ease, and were refreshed by a comfortable sleep 
after the toils of the day.* 
The only drawback to this new method of advance 
was the inability to carry a sufficient quantity of food. 
Each man at starting had a fixed allowance of pem- 
mican, -which, with his other load, made an average 
weight of thirty-five pounds. It proved excessive : the 
Canadian voyageurs will carry much more, and for an 
almost indefinite period; but we found—and we had 
good walkers in our party—that a very few pounds 
overweight broke us down. 
Our progress on the 5th was arrested by another bay 
much larger than any we had seen since entering 
Smith’s Straits. It was a noble sheet of water, per¬ 
fectly open, and thus in strange contrast to the ice out¬ 
side. The cause of this at the time inexplicable phe¬ 
nomenon was found in a roaring and tumultuous river, 
which, issuing from a fiord at the inner sweep of the 
bay, rolled with the violence of a snow-torrent over a 
broken bed of rocks. This river, the largest probably 
yet known in North Greenland, was about three-quar¬ 
ters of a mile wide at its mouth, and admitted the tides 
for about three miles ; (23) when its bed rapidly ascended, 
* This halt was under the lee of a large boulder of greenstone, mea¬ 
suring fourteen feet in its long diameter. It had the rude blocking 
out of a cube, but was rounded at the edges. The country for fourteen 
miles around was of the low-bottom series; the nearest greenstone must 
have been many miles remote. Boulders of syenite were numerous; 
their line of deposit nearly due north and south. 
Vol. I.—7 
