84 THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE KARLUK 
south on account of the pressure but when the wind 
blew us towards the west and north we could 
go along without undue danger. The football 
game was played as planned on this day until 
the second engineer strained a muscle in his leg 
kicking the ball along the ice, and the game had 
to stop. 
The easterly gale continued for several days, 
sometimes with hard snowstorms, sometimes with 
clearer skies. The barometer was low; the tem¬ 
perature rose to sixteen degrees above zero. I had 
the engineers at work making tins of one-gallon 
capacity to hold kerosene for our sledges if we 
should have to use them. All of our oil was in five- 
gallon tins which were unhandy for sledging use. 
They also made tea-boilers out of gasoline tins, to be 
used with the Primus stoves; these held about a gal¬ 
lon of tea and were very handy. I had five with me 
on my subsequent sledge trip. Besides these jobs 
the engineers trimmed down our pickaxes so that 
they would weigh not over two-and-a-half or three 
pounds. They put them in the portable forge in 
the engine-room, heated the iron and beat it down, 
and put on the steel tips afterwards. These pick- 
axes were regulation miners’ picks. 
On the seventh and eighth the variable weather 
continued with occasional twilight of considerable 
intensity; the low barometer and high thermometer 
