46 THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE KARLUK 
veniently at once. The whaleboats we provisioned 
each for eight persons for twenty days and we put 
supplies for a couple of months on deck ready to 
be thrown overboard. We fixed up the forward 
hold as a carpenter’s shop for Mr. Hadley and he 
started in to make a Peary sledge. 
This was the kind of sledge that I had been ac¬ 
customed to use on the ice on my various trips with 
Peary. He invented it himself, evolving it from 
the experience of his years of Arctic work and, in 
several important particulars, it was a marked 
improvement over the Eskimo sledge. We did not 
have the material to make an exact duplicate but 
we did the best we could. 
The Peary sledge is thirteen feet long over all, 
with runners made each of a single piece of hickory 
or ash, three inches wide by an inch-and-a-half 
thick, bent up by steaming at each tip and shod 
the whole length with a steel shoe, like the tire of a 
wheel. The bow has a long, low rake and the stern 
turns up to make steering with the upstanders true 
as the runners slide along. The filling-in pieces are 
of oak, fastened with sealskin lashing, and the bed 
of the sledge is made of boards of soft wood, lashed 
to the filling-in pieces. In loading the Peary 
sledge we always put the bulk of the weight in the 
middle and left each end light; with its long rake 
fore and aft the sledge will swing as on a pivot, so 
