IN WINTER QUARTERS 
65 
what he wanted. Then I asked him if the pen was 
what he wanted. He said it was. I gave him one, 
as we had a large quantity of fountain pens, and 
as I gave it to him I thought to myself: “What 
would Peary say?” To live in the open as they 
have been accustomed to live is in his judgment the 
Eskimo’s normal existence and not to become de¬ 
pendent on the white man’s methods of life. We 
had a large supply of blank-books on board, in 
which our scientists jotted down notes and calcula¬ 
tions to be afterwards transcribed on the type¬ 
writer, and I gave Kataktovick some of these blank- 
books from time to time. 
The next day we had another wonderful display 
of the aurora, with brilliant moonlight, which had 
been lighting up the scene for several days. For a 
while in the afternoon, as we drifted steadily along, 
we saw a little of the sun’s upper limb. Our lati¬ 
tude was too far north for us to see the real sun at 
this time of year; it was the distorted sun that we 
saw, like the mirage which one sees in a desert. 
I remember that when I was a boy in the Metho¬ 
dist Academy in Brigus, the town where I was 
born in Newfoundland, the Anglo-American Tele¬ 
graph superintendent at St. John’s once told us 
that when he was a young man at Cape Race a 
certain ship from Europe was expected at a given 
time but failed to appear. Finally they appar- 
