THE ARCTIC NIGHT 
73 
people sixty-seven days* Not every one on board 
liked seal meat but all could eat it. I had Mamen 
at work these days making up a list of things re¬ 
quired in case I went on another Arctic drift some 
time. Murray lost his dredge again on the 
eighteenth when it caught on the ice and parted the 
line; the chief engineer started work at once on 
another. 
December 21 was the Arctic midnight, the day 
of days in the Arctic, the day that we all looked 
forward to, for now the sun was coming towards us 
every day, and every day the daylight would 
lengthen. We were not, of course, getting real 
daylight but at midday we got a kind of twilight 
that was good enough to get about by, out of doors. 
Mr. Hadley and I experimented with the acetylene 
lights but found that outside of the ship they would 
not work because the water froze. 
On the twenty-second much of the twilight time 
was used in clearing away the huge banks of snow 
that had drifted about the ship. The chess tourna¬ 
ment was decided on that day. The men had been 
playing it for a good while and now the winner of 
the most games received the first prize, a box of 
fifty cigars, and the next man the second prize, a 
box of twenty-five cigars. Mamen took the first 
prize and the mate, Mr. Anderson, the second. 
The dogs, which we had been keeping all together 
