WE DRIFT AWAY FROM THE LAND 55 
of blue ice, amply able to stand a good deal of 
knocking about before breaking up. We now cut 
the ship out of the ice which was fast to her sides, 
so that she would ride up to her proper level before 
freezing in again. 
Whether we were to continue in the ice or get 
clear, it was well to have a good supply of emer¬ 
gency stores safe on the ice, because with any ship 
at sea there is always the danger of fire. When we 
got the Roosevelt to Cape Sheridan in 1905 and 
again in 1908 we unloaded her at once and put the 
supplies on land, building a house of the unopened 
biscuit boxes, so that if the ship should chance to 
get afire and burn up completely we should simply 
have had to walk back to Etah with our supplies 
and wait for our relief ship. This experience I 
now applied to our situation on the Karluk. We 
had various coal-stoves on board, one in the saloon, 
one in the scientists’ room, one in my room, with 
fires in the galley and Mr. Hadley’s carpenter’s 
shop and of course in the engine-room, while the 
Eskimo had blubber stoves of soapstone in the 
quarters we had built for them on deck. Besides 
all these stoves we had numerous lamps. To guard 
against the danger from fire we had chemical fire 
extinguishers and about fifty blocks of snow, dis¬ 
tributed wherever there was room for them about 
the ship, and in the galley a hundred-gallon tank 
