DAVID GOES TO GREENLAND

Last year I went on the Beebe trip to the Galápagos Islands on the steamer Arcturus which was all fixed up especially for the journey. This was a scientific expedition down to the Equator to get deep sea specimens, some of them caught at a depth of nearly three miles. The islands where we went are on the Equator six hundred miles west of Ecuador in South America, and going down we passed through the Panama Canal.

“Uncle Will”—that’s Mr. Beebe—let me go on the Pacific part of this expedition as a sort of junior guest. We had many new experiences, some of them pretty exciting. [4]There was diving in a helmet away below the surface of the water, and seeing volcanoes in eruption and lava streams flowing into the sea, and harpooning a big devil fish. Although I was the youngest member of the party—my twelfth birthday was down at Cocos Island south of Panama—I was able to have a part in almost everything. And of course it was great fun.

Captain Bob Bartlett is a great friend of Dad’s. It was Cap’n Bob, you remember, who was with Admiral Peary when he first reached the North Pole in 1909. Well, he and Dad often talked of a Greenland expedition, which the Captain said could be about the finest kind of a trip, with lots to do and see.

The American Museum of Natural History in New York wanted some things from the North for its new Hall of Ocean Life, as well as Arctic birds. So Dad said he would organize an expedition and get the specimens [5]they wanted. Among these are Narwhal, Greenland Brown Shark, walrus, all kinds of seal and many birds. Of course we couldn’t get all we were looking for, but even a part of it would make the trip worth while.

I was told that I could go on this trip to Greenland, and that as soon as school was over I was to go down to the shipyard on Staten Island where the Morrissey was being refitted, and that there would be plenty for me to do there.

We are to go as far North as about seven hundred miles this side of the Pole. In all we shall cover more than seven thousand miles and will be back in October. Perhaps if we’re late Dad will send me down by train from Sydney, for school. And we’re taking a couple of school books too, which he says I’ll have to work at when there is time.

It is certainly exciting to look forward to the adventures which I hope we will have. I’ve a Newton 2.56 rifle and a twenty-two [6]rifle and I hope to get a chance to do some shooting, although I think the most fun will be helping in the scientific and taxidermy work, and in getting the motion pictures. And part of my job is to write a record as we go along, to make a little book later.

“They Set Me to Work with a Paint Brush.”

Last year Mother took me below the Equator. And this year I’m going with Dad 780 miles north of the Arctic Circle—that is, if we have luck with the ice. Anyway, I’m certainly a lucky thirteen year old boy!

School closed on Thursday afternoon. Friday I went to Dad’s office and looked over some equipment. He and I had been working over the equipment and making lists and generally getting ready, for weeks. In the afternoon we went by ferry to West New Brighton on Staten Island to McWilliams’ shipyard, where our boat, the Morrissey, was.

The Morrissey is a two masted Newfoundland fishing schooner. She is one hundred feet long and has a twenty-two foot beam, [7]and draws about fourteen feet when heavily loaded. With us now she draws probably about twelve. Her crew are all Newfoundlanders, wonderful sailors in fair weather or foul. Captain Bartlett owns her, and Dad and some friends refitted her, putting in an engine and making many changes to take care of our party.

Will Bartlett, Mate; “Skipper Tom” Gushue, Bo’sun; Ralph Spracklin; and Billy Pritchard, the Cook.

Jim is the tallest of the crew. He is over six feet and looks like a cow puncher with small hips and broad shoulders. He is a fine ship’s carpenter. Tom, the boatswain, is the oldest and most experienced. He can make most anything that belongs on a sailing vessel. He was with Peary on the Roosevelt on a couple of his trips to the North, including his one to the Pole. Joe is the biggest man of the crew, and Ralph the youngest.

Billy Pritchard is about the most important man on board, to my way of thinking. He is the cook. Bill is pretty small, but he is a grand cook and has had lots of experience [8]at sea. He has been in the far north and has been wrecked four times. When the Morrissey came down from Newfoundland to get us, when the ship jumped in a heavy sea Billy got thrown clean out of his bunk across the galley and on top of the stove. Billy’s helper is Don, who is always very nice to me.

Our skipper is Robert A. Bartlett who was with Peary and has spent years of his life in the Arctic and is about the most experienced ice navigator living today. Cap’n Bob is most awfully nice to me and he and his brother Will Bartlett, who is the mate, say they will help me learn the names of the ropes and to box the compass and all that. You see, I’ve never made a trip on a sailing vessel before, and there is lots to learn.

Well, when I got to the ship, a paint brush was stuck in my hand and I was told to start painting on the hull, as we were then in dry-dock having a hole bored in the stern for the shaft for the new propeller. That day I [9]painted pretty near a quarter of the hull and all day Saturday there was other painting—bunks, lockers, hatch covers, etc. We had lots of fine Masury paint which had been given to the Expedition. And there was plenty of cleaning-up work to do.

The Morrissey is divided into three different cabins. The fo’castle has six bunks where the crew sleep. It is used for the galley also. You know, on a ship the kitchen is called “galley.” Aft of that comes the main cabin where most of us sleep. There is a big table in the middle of the room which is used for eating, writing, working, etc. There are twelve bunks and the wireless outfit in this cabin, and a large skylight put in where the old cargo hatch used to be.

The wireless is a short wave outfit, run by Ed Manley, who is an amateur who volunteered for the job and who just graduated from Marietta College in Ohio. The fine big radio equipment, with which we expect to [10]be able to talk right to home even from north of the Arctic Circle, was given to the Expedition by Mr. Atwater Kent and the National Carbon Company who make the Eveready batteries.

Then comes the engine room which was once the after hold where they stored fish and carried coal when the boat was used for freight. All around the engine are stores, crowded in tight so they can’t possibly shift when the boat rolls around in a storm. Some of them belong to Knud Rasmussen and some to Professor Hobbs whom we will pick up at Sydney. He is going to South Greenland to study the birth of storms on the Ice Cap there. We are picking up Rasmussen at Disko Island on Greenland and are taking these stores for him to his trading station at Thule, near Cape York. Rasmussen is a great Danish explorer and an expert on Eskimo.

Astern of the engine room comes the after cabin where the Captain, Dad, Mr. Raven [11]and Mr. Streeter sleep. There are six bunks, a table, a small stove and the only chair on board. Over the table is a shelf of books mostly about the Arctic and adventure. I have some special ones of my own to read, including Two Years Before the Mast, Doctor Luke of the Labrador, The Cruise of the Cachelot and Richard Carvel. And then Dad has waiting for me a couple of school books, Latin and an English grammar, which don’t sound quite so much fun.

Most of our own stores are in a special store room next to the galley and stored in the run and lazarette away aft. On deck we have over fifty barrels of fuel oil for our Standard Diesel engine which you probably know burns oil and not gasoline.

We started on Sunday, June twentieth, from the American Yacht Club on Long Island Sound. That’s at Rye, our home, and most of the men in our party visited at home with us before we started. [12]

It was a hot sunny day, and a great many people came out in launches and inspected the Morrissey. There was a big lunch party at the Club and Commodore Mallory gave Dad and Cap’n Bob the flag of the Club to take North with us. At about a quarter to five we got clear of the visitors and got the anchor up and started down the Sound. A great many yachts and small boats were all around us, blowing horns and whistles and giving us a grand send-off.

David and His Corona.

Grandpa’s yacht, the Florindia, took all the mothers and sisters and wives of our crowd, with my Mother and my little brother June. They went along with us as far as Sound Beach, Connecticut. And then, when they had tooted their last salute, and we had answered on our fog horn, we were actually off for the North.

Monday was a nice calm day which gave Art Young and myself a chance to stow our stuff. He bunks just below me so we have [13]to go half and half on the lockers. Art is the bow and arrow expert who was in Africa shooting lions. In America he has killed grizzly bear, moose and Kodiak bear with his arrows. He hopes to try his luck with a polar bear and walrus.

The Skipper Tells David About Taking Observations.

Monday morning, our first day out, we saw eighteen airplanes near Block Island, at the eastern end of Long Island Sound, all headed for New York. Perhaps they were going to welcome Commander Byrd, who was expected back in a couple of days, coming home from England after flying to the North Pole. Dad and Mr. Byrd are friends and he was at our house a little before he started on his trip in the Chantier.

There was a fine wind and a pretty small sea running all day. It was nice and sunny, but very cold, so that we all put on lots of sweaters and coats. Everyone ate dinner and supper that day. As we were going up through Vineyard Sound in the afternoon a [14]submarine and a lot of Coast Guard vessels passed us.

Then it began to get rougher with a stiff southerly breeze which was fine for sailing. On the next afternoon we saw a lot of small whales, about 25 feet long. Two or three of them jumped most out of the water, and once about fifty yards ahead of our boat I saw one jump completely out. He looked like a huge bullet.

That day almost all of our gang were sick, and even a couple of the crew. I spent most of the time on deck, listening to Mr. Raven and Van Heilner tell stories about spear traps and the way the Malay natives made and set traps for animals.

We were rocking so hard and keeling over so much that often the water would come in through both port and starboard scuppers. I was looking through a scupper hole when we hit a big wave and all of a sudden the water came right in and hit me in the face as I [15]turned around from watching Captain Bob slack the main sheet.

Ralph, one of the crew, has showed me how to make chafing gear from rope. It is used to keep the sails from slapping and wearing out against the steel cables. And Jim has taught me the names of the sails and is starting on the ropes.

The last two days of the trip to Sydney were not so good, with a lot of fog and some rain. Now and then we heard fog signals on the shore of Nova Scotia, and when the fog lifted saw the shore and lighthouses. It is great fun to go up in the crow’s nest.

[16]

We arrived in Sydney on Thursday morning, a few minutes before two o’clock, and I stayed up to see what happened. By good luck there was no fog, which made things easier.

The first thing in the morning we cleaned up our cabin, and afterward we all went ashore, to a little hotel where we had baths. Bathing on the Morrissey is a very rare thing, although probably later on we will use the big round washtub which was meant for clothes but which I suppose can take us too. When Dad refitted the vessel, at the shipyard down at Staten Island, they put on the deck a big steel water tank which holds about 750 [17]gallons. Then there are the water barrels too so that we really are pretty well fixed.

Up North, Captain Bob tells me, when we get out of water we just go alongside an iceberg and pump the water from pools on the berg over to our tank. For this we have a little pump affair with a piece of garden hose at each end. The melted water on the bergs is fresh, unless sea spray has blown up into the pools.

That morning in Sydney I wrote some letters, to Mother and others. And then in the afternoon Robert Peary, Art Young, Ed Manley, Fred Linekiller and myself went over to the town of Sydney in our little motor launch. Sydney is about five miles away across a big bay, and is far larger than North Sydney where our ship lies.

Over there we saw a very big old square rigger with gun ports all along her sides. She was once a frigate of the British Navy, I suppose about the time of Old Ironsides. [18]We went aboard and looked around to see if we could find any loose belaying pins for my collection, but without luck.

David Tries Carrying Art Young Through the Mud.

The next day Dad, Art Young, Carl, Mr. Kellerman and I went off to see if we could find any trout fishing in one of the brooks which came down to the bay a few miles from our anchorage. We left our boat on a sort of beach and walked up the stream to try our luck. There wasn’t any. After fishing for a while we went back to the boat, which we had anchored a little off shore. But the tide had gone out and we found her nearly high and dry in the mud.

We pushed and we shoved and pulled in mud up to our knees for quite a time until finally we got her off. Art had no boots on so I tried to carry him out but he was too heavy. Then we brought the boat pretty close in and Dad tried to carry Art out. Dad had Art on his back—Art is a big man and weighs I suppose 190 pounds—and was [19]starting to come out when the extra weight shoved his feet right down in the sticky mud over his boots and when he tried to pull up his legs one boot came off and they both lost their balance and fell into the mud and water. They took it as a joke and had to walk nearly a mile before we found a place where they could get aboard easily.

In the Cross Trees.

Over at another beach we ate our lunch which we had brought with us. And near there Art and I got the first game of the expedition. After sneaking up on it we charged in. And what do you think we found?

It was a big clam bed. Altogether we dug about a bushel and that night we had a fine clam chowder. Not quite as exciting as getting a walrus, but at least it was fun and we claimed the clams really were the first game brought back to the Morrissey.

We saw Newfoundland for the first time on the twenty-eighth of June. It was a very pretty sight, the mountains with snow on their sides [20]that had not melted away on account of the very late season. Dad says wherever one goes it always seems that there is an unusual season. On some of the hills the sun was shining and on others great shadows were floating around. In some ways they looked much like the hills in Montana, rolling and mostly bare.

We saw three little fishing schooners off the Bay of Islands, which is a big bay on the western shore of Newfoundland. It took us from four o’clock until eight to cross the bay. We passed one of these boats about seven-thirty and heard someone playing the cornet, not very well. It sounded queer to hear a sound like that come floating across these far-away waters.

There was a beautiful sunset, so red that it looked like blood dripping out of the sky. Ahead the weather looked fine, but astern was a big black cloud with lightning darting out of it every once in a while. And it sure [21]did storm. It was so dark that we couldn’t see a thing. On deck I fell two or three times, as it’s pretty hard to get around in the dark on account of the deck cargo—barrels, dories, motor-boats and the Hobbs canoes, beside lots of lumber and rope.

The wind was blowing like everything and the rain came down in torrents. Art and myself put on our oilskins and boots and went on deck to cover up the skylights that were leaking an awful lot. Skylights never seem to work quite right, anyway. We put canvas and tarpaulins over them. Water was breaking over our bows. But the Morrissey didn’t seem to care a bit, and I think Cap’n Bob and Will really seemed to sort of like it. Cap’n Bob is a wonder and is most awfully nice to me. He seems to like having me work on the ropes and get into things as much as I can about the vessel.

The lightning struck pretty near us once or twice and often the whole sky was bright [22]with forks of blinding lightning darting about wildly.

We saw our first icebergs on the twenty-ninth, and from noon on passed about ten, four of them really big ones. One of them was about fifty feet high and a hundred feet long. An iceberg is about one eighth above water and seven eighths below. You can imagine how big the one I described must really be; and of course later we saw bergs much bigger. The smaller bergs and pieces of floating ice are called “growlers.”

Just a week ago we had reports that the Straits of Belle Isle were frozen over from Labrador to Newfoundland, but the south wind of the last few days seemed to have pretty well cleaned them out, and we went through without any trouble. In the Straits we saw two steamers, which like ourselves were probably making the first passage of this season.

After leaving the Straits we saw scattered [23]bergs all day until about four o’clock when we ran into our first real ice. There were lots and lots of pieces in a huge bunch about three miles by one mile. There were bergs as big as a good-sized house floating around by the hundreds. I went aloft with Ed Manley and looked around on the beautiful sight. The ice was blue on the top and a very pretty light green underneath. When up in the crow’s nest you can see the bottom of the bergs a way down.

In the morning it was pretty foggy and we came close to some big bergs. Once when I was on deck we saw a berg not a hundred yards away that looked like a small hotel, about a hundred and twenty feet high and three hundred feet long.

For two days we were in the ice pretty nearly all the time. This was the Labrador Pack, Cap’n Bob said. One morning I woke up from a jolt when we hit a piece of ice. The bow of the boat goes out of the water and [24]comes down with all its force and breaks up the ice; or else we sort of ride along on it a ways until it breaks loose. Anyway, it is nice to know that the Morrissey is built of good solid oak, and that there is that extra coating of greenheart sheathing around the outside to protect her somewhat from the ice.

There was ice as far as we could see all day long, and some fog. Our course had been zigzagging in and out and around the ice, and it seems strange to come upon so much of it so suddenly when just the other day there wasn’t a bit. It is smooth water where there is a lot of ice, so we made pretty good time even with all our twisting about.

One night we had quite a party, to make the time go well. With our little Pathex machine we had movies, and there was candy and our “foggy dew” orchestra played between the reels, and Art Young played solos on his funny cut-down violin which he has [25]taken to Africa and all over on his hunting trips. “Nanook of the North” was the picture, and Bob Flaherty, who made it, is a great friend of ours and has told me lots about the life of the Eskimos up in the Hudson Bay country. By the way, Dad says that perhaps we will go up there next summer.

It was quite sunny at times during the day and Dad and Mr. Kellerman took a great many pictures, both movies and stills. Mr. Kellerman would go out on the bowsprit and get down on the stays, taking movies of the prow cutting through the ice.

It is very exciting to see how the crew take the boat through the ice. One man is in the crow’s nest, on the foremast. He calls out where to go and then the man at the wheel repeats his words so as not to make a mistake.

You hear the man aloft yell, “Starbo-ard!”

And then at the wheel the helmsman repeats, “Starbo-ard!”

Then the boat swings over to port, because [26]when the tiller is drawn by the wheel in one way the boat goes in the other.

Altogether for me a pretty interesting and exciting First of July. The temperature was about 34, just a few degrees above freezing. And usually at this time of year I am swimming at home!

The Morrissey in Jones Sound.

One night Professor Hobbs of the University of Michigan gave us a lecture on the Greenland Ice Cap. He believes that many of the Atlantic storms start in Greenland. The country, as you probably know, is practically all ice. There is just a little strip of land around the shore, especially at the south, which is not covered with the Ice Cap. It is thought that this may be a mile or more thick, but nobody knows the exact measurement. The glaciers are tongues of the Ice Cap that kind of ooze out to the ocean and then break off into icebergs. There are about three hundred people in the part of Greenland where we are going, up North. The Greenland [27]Ice Cap and the Antarctic regions are supposed to be the coldest places in the world, even colder than the North Pole region.

When Peary crossed the northern part of Greenland he found that when he climbed a hill of ice the wind was in his face; and when he went down a slope the wind was on his back. In other words, that there always seemed to be a wind coming down from the ice. Professor Hobbs and his party, whom we are taking to Holsteinsborg, will study these winds, the movements of the ice and other things.

A Baffin Bay Portrait of the Author.

One time about our second day in the ice when we were winding in and out of the leads we saw a black something in the water. I yelled out to the others to come and see the seal. It was the first northern one I had seen outside of a zoo or circus. I happened to see this one because I was out on the end of the bowsprit, with Robert Peary, our chief engineer, with whom I play around a lot. [28]He is the son of Admiral Peary who discovered the North Pole. This is his first trip North. He and I are great friends.

You probably have heard of Eric the Red. He was a Norwegian who equipped a ship from Norway in the year 983 and set sail for a land that had been discovered by one Gunbjorn to the west of Iceland. When he got to this land he wondered how he could best get people to go there to live, so he called it Greenland. That was the real beginning of the present Greenland. After that cattle were brought and raised in the southern parts.

Greenland is about fifteen hundred miles long from South to North and about six hundred miles wide at the widest place.

We will pick up Knud Rasmussen at Disko Island where, I have read, lots of fossils have been found. I hope to get some for my collection. At home I have a small room which we call my museum, in which I am gathering together quite a lot of really interesting [29]things. Already I have a lot there brought back from the Arcturus expedition, and things given me by explorers and travellers who come to our house. One of my best treasures is a bunch of pieces of the shell of a dinosaur egg, given me by Roy Chapman Andrews, the man who first found these eggs in Asia. They are ten million years old.

[30]

Our first sight of Greenland was on Monday, July fifth. It was very pretty with the great lofty mountain peaks sticking up out of the fog with snow on their tops. All afternoon we followed along the shore northward, and pretty well out. We had come a long way over from the other shore at the Straits of Belle Isle, and what with fog and currents and the ice we had dodged through, it was hard to be sure exactly where we were.

The next morning Captain Bartlett was worried because there was a strong breeze blowing and we did not know whether we had passed our port or not. We wanted to get in to Holsteinsborg. On account of the fog [31]and mists he had not been able to take observations.

We kept a constant lookout with the glasses and about nine o’clock saw something like a big white flag being waved near some small huts on shore. Probably it was a dried seal skin or something like that. Anyway the Greenlanders were signalling us, and we stopped because we were very anxious to get someone on board and find out exactly where we were.

We put over a small boat, and Dad, Peary the engineer, the Mate and Carl went ashore and brought the first man back to the boat. Three kayaks came out to meet them. Carl spoke Norwegian to them and asked where Holsteinsborg was. He didn’t understand so we showed him a chart and named the place. He understood that and made motions that he would show us the way there.

It was great fun to see him go up and down in the little kayak without tipping over. The [32]kayak is the native Eskimo boat, a sort of little canoe made of seal skin stretched over a light frame of small wood. It is decked over all except for a hole, or sort of cockpit where the man gets in sticking his feet out forward out under the deck, where it is only about six inches deep. They have a kind of skin covering that fits over the opening of the cockpit and ties up around their waist tightly so as to keep the water out entirely. The paddle is all one piece of wood, with a blade on each end. They use it holding it in the middle and dipping first one side and then the other. In South Greenland the paddle usually has bone on the end and is smooth in the handle. The northern Eskimo usually has no bone on the paddle, and has a couple of notches cut for each hand hold.

Harry Raven drew pictures of Arctic animals and the Eskimo gave us names for them in his language.

We arrived in Holsteinsborg about four [33]o’clock. It has a very good little harbor just inside the mouth of a fjord. A fjord is an indentation in the land, like a long narrow bay or sound, and usually the hills rise steeply on both sides. Dad says this Greenland scenery is very much like Norway.

The houses are all different colors making a very gay sight. There was a little red church on top of the hill, and all around the bottom was the village, houses made mostly of wood with sods around them to keep the cold out. Some of the native sod houses had tunnels leading into them like the igloos of the North.

The place where we landed was a little dock with a cannery on one side and a big sort of rack for kayaks belonging to the Eskimos on the other.

I had great fun trading at Holsteinsborg. Three of the sailors, Jim, Joe and Ralph, and myself went on shore with some old shirts and one pair of old pants. We went into about [34]ten or fifteen of the huts. There were only about twenty-five huts in the town. They were one-roomed houses with a raised sort of platform for a bed in the back of the room. The cooking and everything was done in the same room. The whole family sleep in one bed. The houses were very stuffy and smelt of skins and dogs. The dogs were all over the place, even lying in the tunnels so that you could hardly get through.

We Get a Basking Shark at Holsteinsborg.

At nine o’clock that night we left for a fjord called Ikortok, to drop Professor Hobbs and his party. We went inland about forty miles. We tied three dories together making a raft to move his stuff in from the boat. One trip the raft was a little too heavily laden and almost went down when one of the dories partly filled up with water.

While the last part of the unloading was going on, Dad, Carl and I went off to try the fishing, without any luck. On shore we saw a bird’s nest that looked as if it might be [35]a good specimen. We tried to get at it, climbing up a cliff, but couldn’t.

Carl Shows a South Greenland Youngster How to Use a Pathex Motion Picture Camera.

When we went out from the land in our little boat we were in very shallow water. The propeller of our Johnson engine hit the bottom and the little engine jumped loose and fell overboard. Luckily we were able to get it again. We rowed all the way back to the Morrissey, as the engine was full of salt water and couldn’t be made to run. The tide was coming in the fjord with great force and it was a hard row, about four miles. When we came to a beach we pulled the boat up and worked on the engine. I took our gun to try and get some birds for eating or for specimens. By the time I was up at the other end of the beach they had given up hope of drying the engine and started to row, calling out that I was to walk back along the shore as that would make the rowing easier. I didn’t like the idea much but I either had to walk or stay there. I had on native skin [36]boots called kamiks which made it pretty hard to walk on rocks. I was afraid of dogs, too, because we had found a litter of dog pups on shore not far from where the Morrissey was anchored. And a mother dog in the North is apt to be as fierce as a wolf when she has pups. I saw one a few hundred yards away so I sat down behind a rock and waited for him to move on.

When I reached the shore near the boat they sent in a dory to take me off.

The next day we stopped at some little villages along the fjord. The Eskimos came out in small boats and kayaks, to trade with us and to see the white men and their strange schooner. They brought out a porpoise because we asked for any fish they had, for specimens.

That afternoon we arrived at a big bird rookery. It was a wonderful sight. The whole side of the cliff was covered with thousands of kittywakes nests. That is a sort of [37]small gull which sometimes gets down to New York in the winter. The birds were making a terrible noise, chattering continuously.

We went up beside the cliff in dories and shot a few birds for specimens and others for eating. We took movies of the birds flying around the cliff. At a distance the flying birds, great clouds of them, looked like a blizzard.

Then we started for Holsteinsborg to drop two men we had picked up there. We arrived at three o’clock in the morning and instead of having the Morrissey go in, we sent them in in the launch, as we wanted to go on to Disko as fast as we could.

[38]

We hit bad weather going north to Disko and had to go in for shelter behind some small islands about forty miles from Holsteinsborg. There were no people there. We caught a few fish and shot some birds for specimens.

On one island there were three deserted sod huts. They were all muddy and full of fish and seal bones.

When we came back from the huts I went fishing with two of my friends, Jim and Ralph. We went away outside in the dory where it was quite rough—at least I thought so. We caught a few rock cod. Jim had a great big halibut right alongside but the fish gave a [39]flip as he was trying to land him and got free from the hook just as he was hauling him over the gunwale.

One night when some Eskimos came on board along the coast we showed them movies of Eskimos harpooning walrus to see how it would strike them. These movies were given in our little mid-ships cabin, where we eat and most of us sleep, with our Pathex projector thrown on a small screen Fred made from the table oilcloth.

When the harpooned walrus pulled the Eskimo hunter, our guests shouted and grunted. It was very funny. They had heard of movies but had never seen any. After the northern pictures we showed some from the South Sea islands. The Eskimos had never seen people in swimming so they didn’t know quite what to make of it. When they were asked by a friend of ours who speaks Eskimo what they thought of it, they only said that they liked them all very much, [40]especially a picture showing lions playing with an animal trainer. They had never seen any animal like a lion. There isn’t a cat, for instance, in all Greenland, we were told.

It is great fun to see the boats come out and meet you and the Eskimos that are entirely different from us and can’t speak a word of English except for words like shirts or sugar or coffee that they have heard. For such things as these they want to trade boots and purses and skins. And in the south they make little kayaks and knives and pen holders and such things out of the ivory of walrus tusks.

They have some very nice hats made of fur and eiderdown. One man brought two little toy kayaks up to me with all the equipment on them, even the little rack to hold the harpooning line, with a tiny model of a man sitting in the kayak. I got one of these for my little museum at home. For this one he wanted an old pair of pants, or some tobacco. [41]Even the women want chewing tobacco. I got some very pretty purses made of seal flippers, with bone latches. It is hard to find trinkets for all of one’s friends at home.

The Eskimos on the whole are very nice and honest. Most of them can play the accordion, and they seem to be very musical and they certainly love to dance.

We have lots of things on board for gifts and trading, especially to give in return for help and labor. Money isn’t much good up here. Our stores include axes, knives, beads, needles, tobacco, pipes, candy, etc. Both men and women love gay colored cloths and small mirrors always go well.

At one of the villages we saw a lot of dogs eating a decayed shark. After the shark has been dead for a few weeks ammonia seems to form in the meat. The dogs love it and after eating it they seem to get sort of tipsy and can hardly walk.

Fred Linekiller, the taxidermist, is showing [42]me how to skin birds. It is very interesting to do it. The first thing to do when you shoot a bird is to put cotton in the wounds and in the mouth so the blood will not run out on the feathers. After that a needle is put through the nostrils and the beak is sewed together, so the cotton won’t come out. Then the feathers on the breast are parted and the skin cut from the breast bone down to the soft part of the stomach.

Looking Down Over a Bird Rookery.

Next cornmeal is poured in. It is used to keep the skin dry and to mop up the blood and moisture. After that is done instead of pulling the skin, it is pushed, so as not to stretch it. More cornmeal is added as the skin is pushed off. When the legs are reached they are cut at the knee joint so as to keep the bone to hold the foot in place. Just above where the tail feathers end is cut and the skin turned inside out and the skin pushed gently toward the head. It can be pushed as far up as a little beyond the eyes. Then [43]the head is scraped and a knife is put between the jaw bone and the back of the head opening up the head so that you get the brains out. Then the skin, inside out, is treated with arsenic powder, and after that it is put right side out again and the feathers fluffed out. Then it is ready to be taken back to the Museum to be stuffed and mounted, or studied as it is.

Nils, David and Matak, Son of Pooadloona.

When I woke up one morning I found that we were in a little but very good harbor, Godhavn on Disko Island. Cap’n Bob has to be up most of the time, especially, of course, when we are moving about. This time, for instance, he was on deck all night, and Dad was with him. Disko is a hard place to get into unless you know it awfully well.

There is a little coal mine near Godhavn. Getting the coal, and fishing, is about all they do, with some hunting especially in the winter. The women do most of the work and the men go fishing and hunting. When we went [44]ashore we saw the women with big baskets of coal unloading a small boat and taking the coal to be weighed and stored away in a big storehouse.

Carl, Mr. Streeter, Art Young and I went shark fishing with two Eskimos out in the mouth of the bay. We fished from about one until four o’clock but didn’t catch a thing. Later we traded some very nice little toy kayaks, all equipped, and also some little sledges with whips and rifles tied down with thongs.

At Godhavn we went all around with the Governor, Carl acting as our interpreter. It is fine having him along as he speaks pretty good Danish. He is an American, but his people are both Norwegian and in his home out in Minnesota they talked Norwegian a lot, and it is pretty much the same as Danish.

We went into the printing office where the only paper in Greenland is published. It is a monthly paper, and the printing house is a [45]small red building with one little press. About three thousand papers in the Eskimo language go out free to practically all the people in Greenland. The Governor gave us a bound copy for our collection. Most of the stuff in the paper is written by Eskimos up and down the coast, who send it in.

The next morning about six-thirty we heaved anchor and left Godhavn. When the anchor comes up all hands are called to the windlass which works with iron bars like pump handles. If there is a lot of chain out it takes a long time and is really hard work.

In the afternoon Dad asked me to fill a little bag with trading stuff because we were going to stop at a village called Proven. We reached there about seven. It was a very small harbor so the Morrissey could not go in, and we used our launch and were greeted by the whole town at the little wharf.

At the end of the dock were about eight sharks down in the water tied up with ropes [46]and still alive. Later Harry Raven got one for a specimen that was ten feet long. Later he found the liver measured nearly six feet.

While Dad and the others had tea with the Governor (all these little hamlets in the south have a Dane in charge whom we call a Governor, even though the average population may be only forty people) I went out to trade for some kamaks or skin boot. These are a sort of double high shoe or boot made of seal skin with the hair turned in and with a hairy inner boot beneath which is put in grass to make it soft and warmer.

The Greenland hair seal is entirely different from the Alaskan fur seal. It has no fur but just coarse hair and has no value except for oil and its hide. I had a chance to get several pairs of kamaks but they were all only about half the size of my foot. The Eskimos are very small people and mostly the tallest only come up to about my shoulder. And naturally they have very small feet. [47]

At Proven I got two pairs of seal skin pants, one for a jacket and the other in exchange for a box of candy and a sweater. I also got a kind of necklace which is worn by the women for “dress up,” for a piece of soap, a bar of chocolate and an army mirror, which was a good bargain, because the necklaces are hard to make and hard to get.

We were going to get a kayak but it would be mean to take one because the Eskimos are like children and would give away almost anything for candy or pretty materials. The kayak is their main way of getting food, and is to them dreadfully important. We always tried not to take anything which was very necessary to the Eskimo, and to give them something really helpful in exchange for important things. For instance, later when we got some kayaks, we gave in exchange lumber and materials from which they could make new ones. A very popular and useful thing [48]we had for gifts was Tetley’s tea put up in half pound tins. This, often with a small bag or tin of sugar, was liked a lot everywhere, while we on board always drank it.

[49]

We left Proven about midnight, and as we started out from the little harbor past some bare rocky islands Dad and some others went ashore to try some shooting. When we came in we had seen a great many birds and ducks flying around there.

They stayed ashore from one o’clock until five, while I was asleep. Later Dad told me it was very beautiful, the water all grey and calm like silver, with a sky sort of lead color with gay tints of orange and yellow and lemon where the sun was low. They brought back tern, eider ducks and some gulls, some to eat, others to be skinned for specimens.

The next day it was very foggy so we went [50]slowly, dodging icebergs which we could see only when we got very close to them. At about nine the following morning we reached Upernivik, which is the last town that amounts to anything in North Greenland and is I think the furthest north town in the world. There is a Danish Governor there and a few other Danes. His name is Governor Otto and he was awfully nice to us, then and later on when we came back.

Upernivik is a nice little place built on an island. Where we landed there was only a little wharf and some store houses and supplies. From this harbor a little path or trail led over a steep hill to the real town, which was down on the other side on a slope to the south, with a grand view of Sanderson’s Hope, quite a big mountain a few miles away and overlooking an open fjord which was no use as a harbor. The village has a dozen wooden houses, including several that are very nice indeed, chiefly the Governor’s house and one [51]for the doctor who lives there, which also is used for a hospital. And about the wooden houses are the sod huts of the natives, most of whom seem to stick to their own style of living. There is a fine new church on the hill just over the village.

We had lunch with Governor Otto and his daughter Ruth, a girl about twelve years old, at his house, and afterward in the harbor we took some movies of an Eskimo turning over in his kayak. He didn’t seem to have a hard time at all. He just kind of fell over on one side, sitting right in his kayak or skin boat, and then came up on the other side with just a twist of his paddle. Doing this he wore a watertight suit of sealskin and a hood over his head, drawn tight about the neck. And around his waist, where he sat in the hole or cockpit of the kayak, there was a skin fastened tight about him so that no water could get in.

Robert Peary thought he would try it so [52]he changed into a sealskin shirt, got into the Eskimo’s kayak—it was hard for him to squeeze in he was so much larger than the Eskimo—and turned half way over. The kayak was upside down and then his head stuck up on the other side and went down again, sputtering. He just couldn’t manage to get up again, and hung head down in the water, the boat upside down right over him. I really thought he was drowning.

Robert Peary Tries a Kayak.

Then he came up a second time and yelled for help. Of course we were close to him and right away Carl got there in a rowboat and he pretty nearly fell in himself helping to get Robert straightened up. And you should have seen the Eskimos laugh! They thought it was a great joke. But Robert seemed to feel he had swallowed about all the ice water of Baffin Bay that he wanted and he was so cold he went back to the ship and changed his clothes. But I’ll bet that next summer at home in Maine he learns the trick. [53]

We had sent some natives out to catch sharks for specimens and Doc, Ralph and myself went after them in the launch. They had caught four big ones and had lost another overboard. These Greenland basking shark, as they are called, are very slow and sluggish. They don’t fight at all. They move very slowly and don’t seem to be savage or a bit like the sharks I have seen caught in Florida.

The next morning Governor Otto took us over to see his dogs, which during the summer he keeps on a bare rocky island about a mile away, where they are entirely to themselves. About every three days during the summer they are fed, mostly ducks which are taken out in a big basket. Most of them seem to have been kept a pretty long time and become pretty “ripe.” But the dogs certainly like them.

Art Young Tries an Eider Duck Egg from the Eskimo Cache on the Duck Islands.

We went over to the island in our launch with the Governor and a couple of Eskimos carrying the food. When they saw us coming [54]the dogs, about a dozen in number, crowded down to the shore and followed along as we went by, yelping and barking crazily. They knew it was dinner time.

We landed and decided to give them the birds up a bit from the water, where it was more level and Kellerman could get movies better. As the Eskimos carried up a big basket of the birds, one of them had to keep the dogs off the man with the basket. He used an oar and beat them. And at that they jumped up and tried to get at the basket of meat on the man’s shoulder whenever they got the slightest chance. I don’t doubt they would have knocked him down if he had been alone.

Then the birds were thrown out to the dogs, a few at a time. In a second they were torn to pieces and gobbled up. A dog will rip one up in a flash and choke down everything but the feathers. There were many fights. And all the time there was a great racket, [55]with the dogs howling and barking and yapping at each other.

It was very interesting to see the King Dog. Each team up in this country has a head dog, the King, who is boss. He is usually the heaviest and best looking dog, and certainly is the best fighter. I believe he just fights his way up to the leadership. Certainly when he “says” anything to one of the others, they do what they are told pretty quickly. Or else they get a licking.

The King has a queen, and it is fun to see the way he looks out for her. When the Queen got a duck or part of one, the King just sort of looked on and saw to it that no other dog interfered. If one of them got excited and started to move in on the Queen and her dinner, the King gave a growl—and that ended it. Or if another dog had a bit of duck, and the King came along, the other fellow just dropped what he had, perhaps running off or sort of turning over on his back [56]and grovelling on the ground. There certainly was discipline on that island.

When it was all over there was just a few feathers scattered around on the rocks and the dogs were mostly with bloody mouths and heads where they had torn up the meat. Anyway, they all seemed to have had a good meal and for the first time settled down quietly, to wait for the next dinner time three days later. In the winter they have their work, and lots of it, and of course they are awfully important in the life of the northern people. There are no horses and of course no automobiles or anything like that. So everything is drawn on sleds, and the sleds are moved by dogs.

The King Dog of Governor Otto’s Team, with His Queen.

The dog skins are especially fine. The fur is heavy and soft and glossy. Dad bought some dog skins to have a coat made.

That afternoon we left Upernivik to go north across Melville Bay. Everyone was on hand to see us off and the Governor fired [57]the little cannon up on the hill where they had the Danish flag hoisted. They gave us a salute of three guns and we answered with three shots from a rifle.

The Duck Islands are a few little rocky islands a dozen miles or so off the mainland of Greenland just at the south side of Melville Bay. About two o’clock the next afternoon we reached them, anchoring in a sort of harbor between the two largest islands. The bigger one is I suppose about two miles long and half a mile or so wide, very hilly and all rocks. About the shores, where there is a little level land, the rocks are covered with moss and there are stretches of bog and mud.

We went around a good deal on both islands and saw a great many eider ducks which nest here in large quantities. In the old days when the whalers came into Baffin Bay this was a headquarters and then they used to gather duck eggs by the boat load.

Feeding the Dogs at Upernivik.

[58]

We saw many ducks nesting. The nest is just a little fluffy round mass of the soft feathers, right on the ground. They pull the feathers out of their breasts, so that when you get the female ones they look as if someone had plucked a handful of down from their undersides. This is what is called eider down, and is used in very fine mattresses and pillows. It is very warm and is also quite valuable. The Eskimos collect the eider down from the nests and from the birds, and it, with skins of foxes and seal, and a few other articles like walrus ivory and narwhal tusks, is one of the chief ways they have of trading with the outer world.

The male and female eider ducks are very different. The female is all brown, while the male is brown only a little on his breast and belly, and with a lot of white on his back and neck, and feathers that are dark grey or nearly black. The female moves very slowly and is very tame and easy to get close to and to kill. [59]We got a good many for eating, and they are kept hung in the rigging to be used as Billy the cook wants them. The male is much wilder and flies faster and is pretty hard to shoot. There were very few male at Duck Island. While the females are nesting the males seem to go off by themselves. Later we saw a good many up in the fjords back of Upernivik. Both are very big and heavy birds, and awfully good eating.

Back in 1850 and on for thirty years or so there was much whaling in these waters. Many of the ships came from Scotland. On the hill or small mountain at Duck Island there is a whaler’s cairn, and also a walled-in place where they had their lookout. In that cairn, by the way, in 1888 Peary left a record. We could find nothing. Probably the Eskimos had cleaned out everything long ago.

In one piece of lowland near the water, where there was a little dirt, we found the [60]graves of some whalers. They were covered over with stones and only one head board with a name, was left. It said: “In memory of William Stewart, A.B., S. S. Triune of Dundee, June 11, 1886. Aged 24.”

Art took me shooting with my sixteen-gauge shotgun, but I didn’t do so well. I haven’t tried shooting on the wing much and I’m pretty bad at it. Shooting with the twenty-two rifle seems easier. Art himself is a grand shot, with either rifle or shotgun.

We found many eggs, and Dad and some of the others, on the other island, found great caches of eggs, hundreds of them evidently gathered by Eskimos who had visited the islands earlier in the season and left them there to get them later. They were put away in a sort of hole with rocks piled up around and over them so that they were perfectly protected, and with the chinks of the rock packed up with moss. They also found the skull of a polar bear. [61]

We found three eggs with little ducks just hatching out. These we brought back to the boat. I put one under a mother duck which I had found alive in an Eskimo trap and the other two behind the galley stove where it was nice and hot. Two of them lived quite a while and then they were killed, painlessly, and put away for specimens. We got some nests for the Museum and I got one for my own collection.

[62]

By the twentieth of July we were pretty nearly across Melville Bay. That was just exactly a month from the time we started from home which is most awfully good time. Of course we were very lucky for all the way we had practically no real trouble with ice.

Melville Bay usually is about the most dangerous and hardest place in the north. Lots of years it may take weeks to make the passage, and sometimes there just isn’t any way to get by it. Later Dr. Rasmussen told me that he has been drifting, frozen in the pack ice, for six weeks solid while trying to get through to the north, and in mid-summer at that. [63]

After we left Duck Island I put in quite some time getting our things ready for trading and for presents. Of course we weren’t going to do any real trading, except for little personal things some of us wanted. Most of the stuff was to give natives who helped us in the hunting and collecting of specimens. One of my nice jobs was filling a lot of tin cans with screw tops with candy and sugar. And we also sorted out some gay sweaters and jerseys which Mr. Alex Taylor, who lives at Rye, had given the expedition. (All our crew, by the way, now have Alex Taylor sweaters and they certainly came in handy.)

We arrived at Cape York on the night of July 20th. Cape York is a big cape which marks the northern end of Melville Bay and really is the beginning of far North Greenland. The people living there and in the few settlements further north are the Smith Sound tribe of Eskimos, who live nearer the North Pole than any other people. About at this [64]latitude is further north than the most northerly points of the mainland of any of the continents, North America, Europe, or Asia. So we felt we really were beginning to get pretty far north.

In a Fjord Back of Upernivik.

The Cape itself is a high mountain which sort of spills right down into the sea. The slopes, some of them, are quite red, and the snow is all colored crimson too, from a sort of dust which seems to cover it. This part is called the Crimson Cliffs, and they have been seen and described by about every Arctic expedition. In behind the cape is a great glacier which breaks off right into the water very conveniently. Cap’n Bob put the Morrissey right up alongside the ice wall and men jumped down on the glacier from the bowsprit and carried lines and fastened the ship so she lay right alongside, as if the ice were a wharf. Of course there was no wind and the water was quiet.

Then they took a hose and ran it up a way [65]and put one end in one of the many streams which were running down the top of the glacier, melted snow water. There was enough slope to carry the water into our big tank on deck. Also the sailors filled the barrels, using buckets. It was a great way to get a full load of real ice water.

While we were working in the Eskimos came off in their kayaks. We bought a fine kayak for a rifle and some ammunition. The very next day, when we were ashore, we found that the owner of the traded kayak already had a new one well started. I suppose in a few days more he was all fixed up with a boat again. And with his really fine rifle he ought to do most awfully well hunting. I certainly hope so. A kayak to an Eskimo is about the most important thing in life. I imagine a rifle would come next. Compared to an automobile with us, our auto is only a luxury which we really could get along without.

Tupiks, the Eskimo Summer Houses Made of Skins, at Karnah.

About a mile from the little settlement of [66]Cape York there is a “bird mountain.” That’s what they call the places where they find the dovkies, or little auks. These are small birds which live on mountain sides where there are talus slopes—that is, big slides of loose rocks all piled up. They make their nests down in the holes and cracks and they are very hard to find.

An Eskimo went with us in the launch around to this bird mountain. We climbed up the slope to a regular place they use where there was a sort of rough blind made out of the loose stones. He carried a net with a long handle. We sat down on the slope, partly hidden by the blind. Then the birds would fly past, always in the same direction. They seemed to be always on the move, getting up off the rocks and swinging around in a great circle out over the sea and back again. There were thousands of them.

As a bird would fly past us, almost near enough to touch sometimes, the Eskimo [67]would make a quick swoop with the net, and plop a dovkie would be in it. Then he would quickly pull in the net, take the bird out, kill it and be ready for another. This is chiefly the work for women who are awfully good at it and catch hundreds and I guess thousands. They are fine eating, and the skins are used for making bird feather clothing, as lining to wear next the skin.

After our Eskimo friend Kaweah had showed us how to do it, I tried. It looked awfully easy. But it wasn’t. I made a lot of misses.

Dad and Dan Streeter were looking on and taking pictures, and they laughed as I swiped at the birds and missed them.

“Three strikes and out!” they’d call when I scored three misses.

But after a while I did catch a few, and some I just hit with the net pole and knocked them down, sort of stunned, when we got them. Dad and Dan also tried, but they [68]didn’t break any records. A fellow with a batting eye like Babe Ruth ought to do pretty well at this game. Anyway, it was great fun, and was of course the first time I ever caught birds with a net. Funnily, almost the next day I actually did catch some others with a loop on a string.

Where the vessel lay that afternoon was right next a big lot of bay ice, pans of ice with some water between them. In the distance here and there we could see seal. They sit up in the sun, but almost always right near a hole in the ice. And the minute they get frightened they slide off and are gone. Even if you shoot them, unless death is very quick, they are likely to flop off into the water, where they sink.

Dan and one of the Eskimos tried some stalking, crawling up on the seal or pooeesee as the Eskimos call them. And he had pretty good luck, hitting three, two of which they got. They also got pretty wet crawling over [69]the ice and through pools of water melted by the sun. Anyway, it was our first game. The seal meat was fine, too.

The next morning we had moved northward to Parker Snow Bay. We were anchored there when I woke up. It’s a beautiful place, a little bay right on the coast, with a bit of flat land with a glacier coming right down behind it and stretching up to the great ice cap. Two steep fine mountains are on either side of the glacier, and one of them we named Bartlett Peak. Along the shore one of these mountains has steep cliffs which fall right down into the water. And there is a great bird rookery, or loomery as the Newfoundland folks call it.

On the shore we saw a blue fox. And then after breakfast we went to work at the rookery to get specimens. It was a beautiful calm sunny day and we really had a grand time. Some of us were at it until afternoon and sent back a dory to bring us some lunch. [70]

We climbed up a cliff, getting at it on the easier side of a steep little point. From there we could reach right down to some of the nests. We could even touch some of the birds, both auks and kittywakes. They were sitting on the nests, either with eggs or very young birds. (Three weeks later when we came back there were many more young ones.)

It was here that I used a light line to catch several birds. I made a slip noose in the end and let it a few feet over the edge of the cliff so that it rested on a nest. Then when the bird came back, if she settled down right, I pulled the noose suddenly. It worked quite well.

Bob Peary, who is very handy at getting around and climbing, put a rope around himself and we let him down over the cliff to get eggs and nests. Art Young and Carl were the “anchors” on the other end of the rope. Once on his way down in one place Bob [71]stepped on a loose rock and knocked it out. When it fell it started a big bunch and they all went tumbling down into the water with a great splash and crash.

The cliff was right straight up and down, with a sort of shelf sticking out perhaps twenty feet from the water. After a while Bob went down there, where he could stand and then Dad was let down with a small movie camera to get some pictures. Later the launch went around below them, and while the men at the very top held the line tight, the men in the launch held it tight at the bottom and first Dad and then Robert slid down it into the boat, after first letting down the bucket with eggs and a box of nests and some little ones they had gathered up.

[72]

On Monday July twenty-sixth we struck a hidden rock off Northumberland Island which is at the mouth of Whale Sound away up at Latitude 77 degrees and twenty minutes north, on the east side of Baffin Bay. We were cruising around the island trying to locate some Eskimo whom we wanted to get on board to help us hunt. We were just getting into the good game territory. The evening before we saw seventeen walrus from the deck.

Captain Bob had been told back at Cape York that certain Eskimo were at places where they usually lived, but when we got in sight of them the tupiks were deserted. These [73]people move about a lot following up where the hunting is best, and probably the fact that the ice had gone out of the fjords and bays unusually early had made them change about unexpectedly.

Anyway, we were pretty close in shore, examining four sod houses on a point. A big wall of rock stuck out of the mountain behind, coming down toward the water. It is what geologists call a “dyke”—harder rock which stands up under the rain and snow, like a wall, with the softer stuff sloping down from it on either side, sort of washed away.

Well, this “dyke” evidently stuck well out underneath the surface of the water. Afterward we found there was deep water on both sides of it, right close up. But we managed to hit the very outer knob of it, about ten feet or so below the surface.

It was about twelve thirty in the morning when we hit, broad daylight of course, with the sun shining brightly and fortunately no [74]wind or sea running. It was very, very exciting. I was almost thrown out of my bunk when we hit. There was a jar and a jolt and then everything stopped. We had often hit into light ice, which jarred the vessel a bit, but never anything like this.

As quick as I could I put on my pants and was just getting on my stockings when Dad called down from the skylight for all hands to get on deck and never mind dressing. I woke up Bob Peary and Doc and we all rushed on deck.

We moved oil casks for half an hour from the after part of the ship to the bow so as to take the strain off the stern where the vessel had struck and was sticking on the rocks. It was just high tide when we hit. We raised the foresail, jib and jumbo and had the engine going full speed, but she didn’t budge. Then, as the tide began to leave us, we took a lot of stores ashore in our dories and started in to do what we could for the next tide.

The Morrissey on the Reef Off Northumberland Island.

[75]

The Morrissey was listing on her port side at an angle of forty-five degrees or worse, and everything was in a dreadful mess on board. You just couldn’t stand even on the dry deck and where it was slimy with oil, as most of it was, the only possible way to get around was to hang on to a rope. And at that, what with moving around the heavy oil drums there were plenty of bad spills. Cap’n Bob cut his hand badly and Doc bandaged it up right away. Down in the cabins everything was in a heap. It was funny to see the clothes hanging on hooks from the ceiling stand right out crazily at a wild angle from the walls, like drunken men.

The tide went down leaving the vessel high and dry, except for the bow which was in the water, tipped down at a bad angle and the stern up on the rocks. Cap’n Bob lashed ten empty oil drums on either side close to the keel at the stern, to help raise her when the water came in.

View from Shore of the Wrecked Morrissey.

[76]

We just had to be ready for any emergency in case the Morrissey proved to be hurt so badly she couldn’t float, or especially if a storm came up which would have broken her to pieces quickly and made landing stuff very hard and perhaps impossible. And you must remember we were nearly one thousand miles from the nearest Danish settlement and more than 2000 miles from Sidney, the nearest big place.

One thing we put ashore at once and very carefully was the emergency low power radio set with which Ed Manley, our radio operator, could keep in touch with the world in case our big outfit on board was lost. That little set which might have been so awfully important was given us by the National Carbon Company who make the Eveready batteries.

And then the noon tide came and we were dreadfully disappointed. For the water didn’t rise to within about three feet of the midnight tide when we struck, so we were left with no [77]hope of getting off until the next tide. And that was pretty bad, because all that listing and pounding was dreadfully hard on a vessel, and would surely break one up less strong than the good old Morrissey, which is built of oak and is unusually sturdy.

But the water did get high enough to wash in over the deck on the low port side, even if the vessel couldn’t raise. There was a bad leak strained in her side and she leaked so badly we all had to help bail with pails lowered with ropes through the skylight into the mid-ships cabin. We couldn’t use the pumps because she had such a bad list, and tip forward, that they didn’t get at the water.

My bunk and two others filled up with water all mixed with oil, and my things, especially in the locker underneath, got pretty well spoiled. Luckily someone lifted out my bedclothes.

The stove in the galley and in the after cabin had to be put out, as there was danger [78]they would spill over and set the ship on fire. The big galley stove was braced up with seal hooks to keep it from sliding. Billy the cook moved in to shore and kept making coffee there so the men had something hot to help keep them going. Before it was all over most everyone had been working continuously more than forty hours. I was at it more than twenty-five, and was pretty dead tired.

The Captain ordered all the food put ashore and there was a lot more to do, lashing more casks and trimming the cargo and moving gasoline to land, for the motor boat in case we got stuck, and kerosene for the primus stoves. Then, too, they put out the big heavy anchor, taking it in the dories quite a way from the ship and dropping it, so that we could haul on it with the windlass.

While the tide was down there was a lot of work to do on the banged-up bottom of the vessel. The false keel, which is a big timber on the very bottom below the real keel, was [79]pretty well ripped off aft of the mainmast, and a lot of oakum was loosened out of the garboard seam. Lying down on the wet rocks we filled in a lot of oakum, which is a sort of fibre like shredded bagging or say potato sacking, with caulking tools, which is a blunt kind of chisel and a mallet or hammer to pound the stuff into the seams or cracks.

Then we got a lot of Billy’s dish washing soft soap and mashed it up with a hammer and worked it in our hands into a kind of pasty putty. We put this in on top of the oakum. We worked in the water until the tide got up around our boots, and then climbed the ladder up on deck. I was able to help quite a bit on this job, and afterward there was plenty to do bailing.

On shore we put up one of our small tents and took in most of our things, like sleeping bags, blankets, guns and ammunition. Everybody as best they could threw their things together to land. It was exciting, and exactly [80]as if we were abandoning the ship. And awfully sad, too, to see our fine Morrissey all soaked with water and oil, and everything thrown about so terribly.

Where the Morrissey’s False Keel Ripped Off on the Rocks.

After the unloading work, and after the men had had a mug of coffee and hardtack and whatever Billy could dig out of the cans, it was pretty nearly high tide again, along about eleven o’clock at night. The sun, of course, was always about the same distance above the horizon, only at a different point, so it seemed always a sort of bright afternoon. We were terribly lucky not to have it stormy.

All hands were called on board and while three men worked the pumps the others manned the windlass. We had the big anchor and a small one out, to pull on with the windlass.

There was a good wind coming up so we had to get her off then or she would surely break up and leave us there. After working for an hour or so we were just about to give up when [81]the wind freshened more. Cap’n Bob ordered all sails hoisted. Everyone got on the halyards and pulled as hard as they could. The wind flattened out the sails and the engine went full speed ahead. But for a good many minutes she held fast and we were most awfully discouraged.

Then all at once there was an extra big wave and a puff of wind, and suddenly she gave a sort of groan and slid free of the rocks. After twenty-five hours we were off! We sure were glad.

Dad, Carl and myself went ashore to get the stores in order in case it rained, while the Morrissey was taken around to leeward some place where they could care for her better and see how things were. She seemed to be leaking a lot, and the plan was, in case of the water getting away from the pumps, to beach her.

When the Eskimos Came to Shipwreck Camp on Northumberland Island.

We turned in right away, at about half-past two, I suppose. And when we woke up [82]it was two in the afternoon! We were pretty tired, I reckon. And then, too, Carl had been quite sick and had had a pretty hard time to keep going at all.

The Morrissey had disappeared. Of course we didn’t have any idea where she was, but there was nothing to do but wait and fix things up as best we could. The next day, in the fog Carl and Dad went out in the motor launch to try to locate the crowd, but they did not find the vessel.

So we built a sort of house, the craziest house you ever thought of. Robinson Crusoe never saw a funnier one. It had three walls, all made of food, mostly, with a big sail pulled over for a roof and some tarps to help out. The strongest wall, where the wind blew from, was built of flour sacks laid up on boxes of tinned vegetables. There were bags of potatoes, crates of onions, barrels, dunnage bags, hams and bacons in those walls. Anyway, we felt we had plenty to eat for quite a time. [83]We were especially glad to have a fine lot of specially made Armour pemmican, presented by Dad’s friend, Herman Nichols.

We had two big bear skins and these we put on the damp ground with a tarp for a sort of floor. With a primus stove, which works with kerosene, we were quite comfortable even though the wind did blow the sails nearly off the roof. We weighted them down with big rocks, and tied heavy hams that Mr. Swift had given us by ropes at the sides.

I got quite sick and had to keep in my sleeping bag about the whole time we were at “Shipwreck Camp.” It was pretty cold with no fire at all to give heat, but we got along first rate. Dad explained that by that time almost surely word would have gotten through from our wireless that the vessel was off the rocks. The trouble was that the water, at the time of the accident, put our wireless out of commission. It took Ed Manley a couple of days to get it going right again. [84]

The third day about noon, when Carl was cooking up some tea on the primus, he glanced out of the door of our hut and saw four Eskimos coming toward us a long way off on the side of the mountain. As they got nearer we could see they all were carrying big packs.

When they got to the tent the man threw off a little baby he had been carrying in a sling on his back. The mother had a bag of empty cans in her sack, which we recognized as coming from the Morrissey. With the few words we could understand, and a lot of motions and grinning—they are always awfully good-natured and nice—our friends told us they had been aboard the vessel and had been helping pump. She was at anchor on the other side of the island. It seemed she was only a few miles away.

So after we had given them a feed, mostly a big can of peas which they loved, Carl and Dad started to find the ship, leaving me to sleep. I forgot to say that we gave the Eskimo [85]some ham, which looked good and they showed us they would like a taste. But they did not like it at all. It was too salty. They use no salt in their meat, and can’t understand us liking it. “Nagga piook” they said, making funny faces. Which means, “No good.”

About midnight, eight hours or so later, I heard a yell and woke up to see the Morrissey out in the bay beyond where she had run aground. Dad and Carl were on board, and as the wind had gone down they had come around to get the stores.

I was sent aboard and Doc told me to go right to bed and keep as warm as possible. As my bunk was still pretty damp where it had been drowned out, I turned in to Dad’s bunk in the aft cabin, where the fire was going.

When I woke up we were under way and headed south. We planned to go back to Upernivik and beach the vessel there and make repairs. With so many on board it [86]seemed better to Cap’n Bob and Dad not to risk trying to make any repairs on the north side of Melville Bay, which is apt to be a very dangerous place to cross.

If the Morrissey had struck on a rising tide everything would have been all right. One often goes aground up here where hundreds of rocks and reefs aren’t shown on the charts and where all the information for sailors is terribly incomplete. But of course things like that always happen at the wrong time. It was just hard luck. When the wind came up it was either break up or get off.

I have written this in the after cabin as we cross Melville Bay going down to Upernivik. The boat has been in a terrible mess, but is pretty well straightened out now. And everyone has about caught up on sleep.

Around my bunk and Mr. Kellerman’s the boards are crushed in. That’s from the great strain put on the frame and beams when the boat laid on her side, so that when she moved [87]or gave a little the light inner framework of the bunks snapped.

Dad just asked me if I’d like to go again on another northern trip. And of course I said I would. Really my answer was “I’d like to go anywhere with Cap’n Bob.”

[88]

On Tuesday the third of August we arrived in Upernivik again, with Melville Bay safely behind us. And we knew that our trip would have to end right there as we could not fix the leaks in the Morrissey. Coming down she had been leaking about ten gallons a minute. That in itself wasn’t so bad, but the danger was that at any minute it might get worse, especially if any strain came or we hit ice or anything else.

It was my turn at the pumps when we came in. When the engine was not running we had to pump almost continually, for the engine itself used up water from the bilge in its cooling system with a rig Robert Peary fixed up, which helped the pumping a lot. [89]

At once we got some Eskimos on board to do the pumping. Cap’n Bob went ashore to see how deep the water was on the beach and what the slope was, to see if he could beach the Morrissey. Later in the afternoon the Governor and his assistants told us that there was a place about ten English miles (the Danish mile is about four of ours) up a fjord from Upernivik where the vessel could be beached easily. It was a place they used for their own vessels to get at their bottoms.

We left right away and it took about two hours and a half to get there. On the way over we went through a kind of natural gate in the rocks that seemed about as wide as the length of the ship. It was very, very deep because there was a mountain on either side with sheer cliffs going straight down for probably a great many fathoms.

They anchored the boat to wait for a big tide while Cap’n Bob got things ready to try and get her out so work could be done on the [90]bottom. The trouble was that the damage was on the very bottom of the keel so that just to keel her over on her side did no good. From Upernivik Dad had arranged to take up with us a dozen Greenlanders to help with the heavy work, like shifting ballast. Also we borrowed from the Governor his blacksmith and some tools.

Art Shoots Ducks Among the Icebergs from the Dory with the Johnson Engine.

The next day some of us took the Governor back to Upernivik in our launch. Doctor Heinbecker and I stayed there, visiting Dr. Rasmussen, the woman doctor who lives there and visits all around at the little settlements. She makes these trips in her own little power boat, with a couple of Eskimos to run it for her. She is a Dane, and most awfully nice. She is very big and strong, and they tell grand stories about how she drives her dog team in the winter and can tire out men who try to keep up to her. All the time we were at Upernivik she let us sleep in comfortable beds in her little hospital, and in every way treated [91]us splendidly. While visiting there we had some interesting things to eat, like seal meat, auks, duck and ducks’ eggs.

That afternoon Dr. Rasmussen got a message that someone was sick in a little village called Augpilagtok, only a few miles from where the Morrissey was. The others returned to the Morrissey and Doc and I went with the Lady Doctor to this village, asking that they send over there to get us. We went in her little boat which was built in Denmark. It is very sturdy and good in the ice, ploughing along just as if there was no ice at all.

Dad Tries His Hand at Netting Dovekies.

In Augpilagtok there was a tiny store in a little room joined to the house of the head man. His name was Imik and later he went with Dad on a three days trip, to the glaciers and the ice cap. In the store they sold lead for the bullets which they made in crude moulds, and also caps and powder. Their rifles shoot both shotgun shells and rifle bullets, and they make all the ammunition themselves. [92]Here the Eskimos have money which they use in the store to buy biscuit, sugar, tobacco and other things. These are weighed out on funny little scales the weights of which were two old brass hinges.

After a while our launch came with Dad and some of the others and we all went back to the Morrissey, through lots of ice. Most of the way the Lady Doctor’s boat, the Mitik, which is very broad in the beam, ploughed through the ice in front, with our launch trailing along behind.

When we arrived at the Morrissey the Captain wanted to get rid of some of us, to make things easier for Billy, the cook, who had the big bunch of Eskimos on his hands. Also, they were moving ballast and getting ready to put the vessel over on her side which would mean putting out the fires and having everyone camp on shore. The Lady Doctor invited our Doc, Harry Raven and myself to go to town with her, which we did. [93]

We went back to Upernivik in the Lady Doctor’s boat, reaching there about four o’clock in the morning—broad daylight, of course, and with the sun shining brightly, for all this time we were very lucky to have fine weather and really quite warm. I suppose the temperature was about sixty at the warmest and never got below forty.

During lunch, at two o’clock that afternoon we heard another great yelling from the natives.

“Umiaksoah!” they yelled. That is the word for ship. (I have spelled it the way it sounds to me.)

To our great surprise we saw a battleship coming into the harbor. It proved to be the Islands Falk, meaning the Iceland Falcon, the Danish patrol ship. It had heard by radio of our trouble while it was away down in south Greenland and at once had started north to rescue us. The first report, relayed to them by radio from an American vessel in [94]the north, said we had entirely lost the Morrissey and were all on shore. Just why such a report was sent we could not imagine, as of course we had sent out no word of that kind.

Anyway, later on Captain West of the Falcon got another word from the Canadian ship Boethic which was over on the Canadian side. The Boethic had had wireless word with us, and told Captain West the real facts, which were that we were working south to Upernivik to make repairs. So the Falcon came to Upernivik to help us.

I got a small boat and rowed out to the battleship and went aboard. To my great surprise I was greeted by Dr. Knud Rasmussen who had come up on the Falcon from Disko where we had been supposed to meet him. But his ship from Denmark had been very late and he failed to connect with us there. I told him about what had happened to us.

Then Captain West, Commander Riis-Carstensen, Dr. Rasmussen and others went [95]up to the Morrissey to offer help. In the end they sent a fine lot of men up there with a diver and boats and everything. The diver worked for about six days, while the Danish officers and sailors lived aboard and camped ashore. It proved that with the diver it was possible to get the leaks just about stopped. But I think that without him we would have had pretty serious trouble. The hard part was to get at the damaged place, which was on the very bottom of the vessel. And at the beaching place where they sent us it turned out there was not enough tide to get the bottom clear out of water.

We certainly were very grateful to the Danish officials for all they did for us. No one could possibly have been nicer or more generous. And I never saw a finer lot of men. It was great fun for me to be with them on the ship and around town. Most of the sixty men aboard were from all over Denmark, fine younger men who were doing their one year [96]of compulsory naval service. In Denmark every man has to serve in the army or navy for about a year of training. And I think they all love to get on this Greenland trip, it is so different.

Carl and Art Try Swimming at the Foot of the Glacier.

While they were working on the boat we moved into Upernivik, Doc, Harry and I. Dad took three men up to the glacier, where they got pictures and collected some bird specimens.

It was a very gay time for Upernivik, probably about the most exciting they ever had. For not only was the Morrissey there but also the Falcon with a crew of sixty, most of whom were ashore much of the time. There was a dance in a big warehouse near the wharf every night, which always lasted until morning. In fact, there just wasn’t any night. In the summer when a boat comes to those far away towns, they forget all about sleeping. Everyone stays up all the time. For the people in the boats it really is pretty hard, for [97]the people ashore at least can go to sleep when the boat leaves, while it is just then that the work starts for the travellers.

At Upernivik is the farthest north church in the world, they told me. A new building had just been completed, and on the Sunday we were there it was opened. There was a great crowd, and the Governor wore his high hat and everything. Of course we all went, and to the native wedding that afternoon. The hymns were sung in Eskimo, and there was a long Eskimo sermon. The first church in Upernivik was built away back in 1780.

On the evening of August tenth the Morrissey came back to the harbor. The diver had fixed her up finely. Captain West gave Captain Bartlett a letter saying she was quite seaworthy. So we were very happy, as it meant we could keep on with our trip, which had come so near to ending in disaster. And we decided to go north again, taking Knud Rasmussen to Thule.

Up on the Glacier, where the Great Ice Cap Comes Down to the Sea.

[98]

The night before we left they gave us a grand party at Governor Otto’s. All the shutters were closed so the house would be dark. Then, to make it pretty, they lit many candles. Eighteen people crowded into the little dining-room, and there were speeches and quite a fine celebration. I went to bed pretty early but the older people, I think, did not turn in until seven in the morning.

On the Iceland Falcon, the last night, there was another farewell party, Cap’n Bob and Dad dining with Captain West. They loaded on the Morrissey the stores of Dr. Rasmussen and his baggage. He was going back with us all the way to New York, so he had a good deal of clothes and the like.

As we up-anchored and got under way we dipped our flag and fired our biggest rifle three times in salute. Then the Falcon answered with three shots from one of her big guns, and the people on shore fired another salute with their small cannon. Altogether [99]it was a very gay send-off. The Governor was out in his big rowboat, waving good-bye to us. Certainly Upernivik could have treated us no better, and we all appreciated it.

And then we headed north again, with Dr. Rasmussen. And we felt mighty lucky to be on our way again, instead of retreating south. Before us lay our third crossing of Melville Bay, which is quite a record for one season.

Dr. Rasmussen, for instance, has crossed it about forty times. Probably he has travelled up here more than any other living man. He told me that once it took six weeks to get just across Melville Bay, his boat being frozen in solid in the pack ice, and just drifting. How lucky we have been to get across three times with practically no ice at all.

[100]

After crossing Melville Bay again for the third time, and without stopping at Cape York, we arrived in Thule. Coming up, on the other side of Melville Bay, I got entirely cheated out of one stop. It was very early morning and I was sound asleep and they didn’t wake me.

As the boats came out to meet the Morrissey the men waved their hats in greeting. But when they came near and saw that Rasmussen was aboard they started shouting and cheering. The man running the engine in the little power boat was so excited that he forgot to stop the motor and ran the boat full speed and head on into the side of the vessel [101]so hard that most of the people in his craft fell down.

We brought Rasmussen to this trading station of his where he had not been for five years and Dad had agreed to take away for him to New York the fox skins they had traded from the Eskimos during the winter. Also Mr. Rasmussen’s manager, who is also his cousin, had been promised that he could go back to Denmark this year. He had been at Thule continuously for six years. The first time we were there an apple Dad gave him was the first he had eaten in all that time.

We also took from Thule a native girl called Nette, who has been studying to be a nurse and is going back to Denmark to complete her education, living with Mrs. Rasmussen there. We will take them to Holsteinsborg where they will get a steamer for Denmark.

Hans Nielsen is Rasmussen’s manager and he of course is very pleased at the chance to get away. He brought his own kayak on [102]the Morrissey so that he can help us in hunting.

While in Thule, early in the morning, Dad, Dan, Bob Peary and I went out in the motor boat with two Eskimos to look for seal. We went up the fjord about five miles inland to the foot of a glacier and saw about six, but couldn’t get near enough to shoot them. We took several long shots, without success.

We had to go back then, for as soon as Nielsen and Nette were ready we were leaving for Whale Sound. During that morning while they were packing up we had quite a dance outside in front of Mr. Nielsen’s house. Kel took movies of the party. We had a pail of candy and when it was passed around the Eskimos would dig in with both hands. But really they are most awfully polite and these nice people in the North never take anything without being asked first. And I think they never steal. It’s interesting to know what Mr. Rasmussen tells me, [103]that in the Eskimo language there are no swear words. They just don’t use bad language. The worst thing to call a man is to say he is lazy or a bad hunter.

From Thule we took a bunch of Eskimos, including one older man who had been with Peary and was very sick. He said to Cap’n Bob: “I wish for the good days of Pearyarkshua when we had plenty to eat and to wear.”

Of course the Captain knew him well and told me that he used to be about the strongest Eskimo of the whole lot they had and one of the very best hunters. His name is Ahngmalokto. Doctor Heinbecker gave him some medicine, and the skipper gave him tea and bread and jam, but he wasn’t able even to eat that. It was very sad.

Thule itself is at the head of North Star Bay, on a rocky beach that sweeps around like a crescent. Out at the sea end, on one side, is a huge hill with a flat table-like top with steep walls at the top then sloping [104]down evenly in great rock slides which are called talus slopes. It’s a lot like a mesa or tableland in our own west. The name of this queer mountain is Oomunui. There are four frame buildings, the trading station, the furthest north in the world. And about a mile away, across the rock peninsula, is the native settlement, a scattered lot of tupiks, the summer skin houses of the Eskimos, with the stone winter houses nearby along the shore. I suppose there are about forty people.

Since 1910 Rasmussen has run this trading station. It is to help these northern Eskimos, called the Smith Sound tribe. They are the furthest north people in the world. Before, they never had any regular chance to get things, or to trade their skins, except to whalers once in a while, or explorers. Before Peary commenced coming about thirty years ago they had no guns or steel or anything else except what they made and found themselves. They used to make arrow heads [105]out of meteorite chips, and made fire from flint they found. And about all their weapons and knives were made from ivory. The walrus tusk is very fine for this sort of thing.

Even today they have very little, compared with the poorest people of the world we know. But they are healthy and happy and very good natured and kind. And of course they are great hunters. They have to be, to live.

At Thule Rasmussen, and the Danish committee which works with him in running the thing, have a regular kingdom. Dad calls it a benevolent dictatorship, which means that Rasmussen is just about a king, but runs everything for the good of the people. They have money of their own, round pieces with holes in the middle, of three different values. The Station pays with these for the furs, and then the Eskimos use them in getting supplies from the store. Goods are sold at very low figures and the idea is, Mr. Rasmussen says, to make the [106]Station just pay its own way. As I have said in another chapter, we brought up a lot of stores from New York. And now we are taking back the fox skins of the winter’s catch.

Early that afternoon, August 15th, we left Thule.

Harry Raven, Zoölogist, Shows how to Clean a Narwhal Skull.

The next morning when I came on deck we were just off Northumberland Island and I saw the very place where we had been wrecked and so nearly spent quite a time at.

I was on the crosstrees on the lookout for walrus and saw some seals and two that might have been walrus. When I got cold Bob Peary took my place. Soon afterward we stopped running on account of fog, and most everyone turned in to sleep, for with the all-the-time sunlight we never seem to find time to get enough sleep.

I was down in the main cabin when Mr. Nielsen came down and said to Carl, who speaks Danish, that there was a dead white [107]whale near. I got Dad and told him about it. In a few minutes they had a boat over and went out to get him. When they reached the floating animal they called back that it was a female narwhal, and not a white whale after all.

They towed it in and we put two or three tackles on it and started to get it aboard. It was about fifteen feet long and weighed I suppose over a ton. It had been dead quite a time and smelt pretty bad, so we decided to open it as it hung beside the boat and get the intestines out and some of the blubber off. The inner meat proved to be sound and all right.

Working on a Narwhal Skeleton.

We fixed a rowboat alongside and Harry Raven and Fred got in it and did the cutting up, with their oilskins on, for it was pretty messy. With the narwhal Harry found a little one. And he wasn’t so little either. He measured five feet seven inches. This was carefully embalmed. That is, Harry [108]pumped into its veins a fluid which preserves the flesh. It is to be taken back to the Museum just exactly as it is. I think a baby narwhal is a very rare specimen, and we all hope this one gets back in good condition.

[109]

Karnah is an Eskimo settlement on Whale Sound north of Thule and just inside Northumberland Island where we were wrecked. The last time we were not able to get in on account of ice. We headed for there now, to get hunters, the Whale Sound territory being fine for walrus and narwhal. Also some white whales are caught just to the north.

When we were about three miles from Karnah a kayak came alongside. A man climbed out who grinned from ear to ear when he saw Rasmussen. He proved to be the missionary at Karnah, named Olsen, an old friend of Rasmussen’s. Seeing the masts he had come [110]out to meet us. We were, of course, the only vessel of the year. He showed us the way in to Karnah, where there was plenty of good water for the vessel.

By the time the anchor was down there were a dozen or more men on board. Soon Rasmussen and Dad went ashore and arranged for hunters to go out after narwhal. Very soon after we got there great processions of the narwhal began to move up and down the sound in front of the village. Several times we saw a kayaker practically on top of one, ready to throw the harpoon, but something happened and he didn’t get it. Another man came in, who had got a harpoon into a narwhal, and told us his line had broken.

A narwhal seems to jump just about the same as a porpoise, only he runs larger. He is very pretty, with a mottled skin like castile soap with blotches of white and lead color. The male has a big tusk sticking out of his [111]head, on the left side and straight out in front. It is ivory, with a twisting spiral surface. The biggest tusk I’ve seen is about ten feet long. They have been called “Unicorns of the Sea.” The biggest narwhal we got was fifteen feet long, and I expect they run up to twenty feet.

We spent most of the night at Karnah, visiting and getting narwhal skulls, while the hunters were out. It was decided that Rasmussen would take Bob Peary and the big dory with the Johnson engine and go up the fjord to try and get a couple of narwhal.

Later I learned that just after Dad had turned in at three-thirty two hunters got their narwhal near by. In the morning when I came on deck there was a fine big narwhal with a tusk. He was fifteen feet long, not counting the tusk, which was about seven or eight feet long. Later a small female was brought in, about nine feet long.

All day Fred and Harry worked on these [112]narwhal. Because the narwhal were so heavy, to get them on board we had to use the two throat halyards. Fred took plaster casts of the heads and tails and fins. Photos were taken from all angles, and measurements and strips of skin were taken, so that a whole narwhal model can be constructed at the Museum. After this work was done we started in to clean the meat off the bones. Most of us wore rubber boots so as not to mind walking in the blood, but the Eskimos didn’t mind at all. They, of course, get the meat for themselves. While we would flounder around and have to cut two or three times the Eskimos would go ahead very quickly and skillfully, as they have done this sort of thing so many times. The skeletons were completely stripped in a few hours.

Kakutia of Karnah, the Eskimo Artist who Made the Sketches Used in this Book while on the Morrissey in Whale Sound

From Karnah we took with us six hunters with their kayaks to help us get walrus. Four of them used to be with Peary and their names are Etukashuk, Pooadloona, Kudluktoo [113]and Kesingwah. The last named was one of the Eskimos who came back with Captain Bob from 87 degrees 47 minutes north, only a few miles from the North Pole when he was with Peary in 1909, who went on to the Pole itself.

They are all fine looking men and although they speak very little English they catch on to things very quickly and are awfully nice people to be with.

Two Blond Eskimos! David and Nils.

There are two fine boys. One is Pooadloona’s son, Matak. The other is Nils, who is sixteen. He has very light hair, about the color of mine, and blue eyes. He comes from South Greenland, and his father, I guess, is a Dane. He is awfully good in a kayak and built solid all around. While three years older than I am he doesn’t come quite to my shoulder. Of course all these people are very small. Very few of the men, I think, are over five feet five inches, but they are built like oxes usually with short legs and [114]thick bodies and a little fat although hard. This boy Nils has killed seal and narwhal all by himself.

Also we took on board a nice Eskimo called Kakutia, which means something like “He of the Quiet Voice.” He is a fine artist and loves to make drawings of the weapons they use, of the animals and things like that.

We gave him paper and pencils and during two days he worked along and made a fine lot of drawings. Some of them will be used as decorations in the book that will be made from this. It’s great fun to think that my little book about Greenland is to be illustrated, partly, by a real Eskimo, and that the pictures themselves actually were made in the cabin of the Morrissey, here with me and Dad, right in Whale Sound in latitude seventy-eight north.

Later on I found out that Kakutia is the son of Panikpah, whom Captain Bob knows very well. He was one of the Peary men and [115]was an artist too. A number of his sketches are used in different Peary books. It’s interesting to see this being able to draw inherited by the son from the father.

We are giving Kakutia a big roll of paper, some pads, pencils and a fine lot of lovely crayons, most of them Crayola given me by Grandpa Bub. He is delighted with all this and I expect will have a lot of fun this winter drawing and coloring pictures. And of course we gave him also useful things, for he has been fine to me. I hope later, by Rasmussen or in some way, to send him copies of the book, for Dad says his name is to appear on the title-page as the one who made the decorations.

[116]

At about six-thirty in the evening of August 16th a little way off Northumberland Island we saw a herd of walrus. They were moving along in the water quite fast, diving now and then and rising up a lot like porpoises. They get their food from the bottom mostly, eating clams and things like that.

By the way, Captain Bob does a lot of dredging—that is, we drag a sort of net along the bottom to bring up the sea life there—and here in Whale Sound his hauls are the richest yet. There are clams and great numbers of shrimp. Which of course is why the walrus like it here.

In a few minutes the Eskimos were in [117]their kayaks and out after them. It was very interesting to watch. One Eskimo would go ahead of the herd and make a lot of noise to attract their attention. Then the other hunter would come in behind very slowly and quietly and try to get within perhaps a dozen feet and then throw his harpoon with all his force into the walrus. There would be a very loud puff, like steam escaping, as he took breath and then a flip of his tail and he would disappear. The man in the kayak would back off quickly so the walrus wouldn’t come up under him. Then they would watch the float, which is an inflated sealskin, attached to the end of the harpoon line to see which way the harpooned walrus would go.

As the float moved off, or was drawn under water by the diving animal, they would follow. It was all very dangerous, and many Eskimos are hurt and killed when angry walrus turn on their frail little boats which one toss of a walrus’ tusks would smash to bits. [118]In attacking the walrus lifts his head and comes down on the thing he is attacking with the end of his sharp tusks, ripping things terribly. I saw them attack several floats that way.

Pooadloona Throws His Harpoon at a Walrus.

When the walrus came up, and the men could get close, the same sort of performance was gone through with again. Only this time they would try to get close with their lance, to stick it into the animal to kill him. The other animals in the herd often would stay close to the wounded one, barking and roaring something like a cow mooing, and puffing and blowing water. It is very noisy and very exciting. When the others come close, the Eskimos would bang their paddles on the paddle rest in front of them and yell, to scare off the other walrus who otherwise might attack them. Sometimes when scaring the walrus away they get within three or four feet of them.

In a short time there were four walrus [119]harpooned, three of them lanced and dead and ready to be picked up by the Morrissey. We had the launch fast to one of them that was only wounded. We did not want to shoot him, as he had a fine head and the bullet is apt to break the bone structure and hurt it for use as a specimen.

Art, Dad and Captain Bob went out in the launch to get him. The Captain wanted to lance him, himself. He told Art to do the shooting with his bow and arrows. Art shot at him seven times, all striking in the neck. He was bleeding badly and getting pretty mad. He would have died from the arrows, but they wanted to finish him as quickly as possible.

He pulled so hard that he turned the Morrissey around. He was fast to the ship by a native line made of the hide of the bearded seal, or ugsug. Its wonderful strength is shown by its power to pull the vessel about.

Walrus on Deck. All the Meat Went to the Eskimos, the Skeletons and Hides to the Museum.

At last he gave up trying to get away and [120]made a rush right at the launch. He sort of got on his back and put a flipper on each side of the bow of the little boat and tore furiously with his tusks at the bottom. We were watching from the deck of the Morrissey, only thirty feet or so away, and we could see the splinters fly. He put two holes right through the boat.

The Eskimos were in their kayaks and they and Captain Bob succeeded in lancing the big bull, who once came right up under a kayak which really almost slid right off his back as the kayaker paddled desperately away.

After he was dead we hooked the two throat halyards on him and hoisted him on board, which was quite a job. Then we went around to get the other walrus which the hunters had killed. In all there were seven and a little one I will tell about in a minute.

A nice thing about this kind of hunting is that not a pound of meat is wasted. As a matter of fact it is a blessing for the Eskimos. [121]Every bit of it is taken by them and used for their own food and for dog food. Our coming just helped them get their supplies. I suppose in all they got four or five tons of meat, what with the walrus and the narwhal.

After that Dad, Dan and myself went out in the little rowboat and followed along after two hunters in kayaks. They went right into a herd of about forty and harpooned one and motioned for us to come up and shoot it. There was a good-sized herd within fifty yards of us, puffing, grunting and barking. Now and then stray animals would come up right close to the boat. They look awfully funny with their whiskered faces popping up on the surface and glaring at you like cross old men. Then they give a grunt and a spray of steam and down they go.

When they were excited like this they formed sort of a circle with the tusks of all the old bulls facing out toward the hunters. I can’t imagine a more exciting sport. I wish [122]that some day I could learn to use a kayak really well and try getting a walrus myself.

“Halitosis,” the Baby Walrus Roped by Carl.

When we were pretty close Dad fired five bullets, four of which, I think, hit him in the head and neck. But the rifle is only a 256, not a very big bore, and it didn’t do the work. Then Dan fired a shot with his big high-powered rifle and hit him in the back of the neck and he dropped instantly. This one floated. Many of them sink the minute they are dead.

We went back to one that Doc and Kellerman had shot after we picked up the others. Two hunters in kayaks were waiting there. This was a big cow walrus. But most interesting was that beside her in the water were two young walrus. The older was a bull calf, a yearling I suppose.

We wanted to get these young ones alive so Carl went for his lasso. Dad rowed Carl out in the little boat. Carl stood up swinging his lasso all ready to throw when he [123]got the chance. They went right up alongside the old cow, who was floating partly out of water.

When the tusked calf came up Carl threw the rope, but the first throw slipped off. Then it was evident that the smaller calf, which had no tusks, was easier to get, seeming to be less wild. So Carl went after him and about the third throw got the rope around him, which was quite a job because his head was small and slippery and he dove quickly.

There was a great splashing and goings on. The little walrus wasn’t so very little. He weighed about 150 pounds and was as strong as a young bull. Carl hauled the rope in over the stern and finally got more of it around the walrus and sort of hogtied him. Finally they dragged him over to the Morrissey and he was hauled up on deck with a burton, which is a tackle used to raise and lower the dories. In the meantime the other young walrus had disappeared.

Hoisting a Walrus on Board.

[124]

I suppose that perhaps this is the first time that a walrus ever has been captured with a rope. Anyway, it’s certainly the first time this particular cowboy has roped one. I know that polar bears have been roped before.

We kept the little walrus on board for two days. Dad called him Halitosis. He didn’t smell so sweet. We tried feeding him milk, and he seemed to take a little, through a hose. He would bark fiercely at everyone. But the really sad thing was to see him when he first came aboard. The bodies of the other walrus were in a great heap on deck. At once he smelled around and found his mother and the poor little fellow got right over to her and sort of snuggled up close to her, quiet as could be.

Later Harry killed him painlessly with chloroform and he was embalmed to be taken back just as he was to the American Museum of Natural History. [125]

We dropped all our hunters at Karnah after a day there, during which we visited around and settled up what we owed the Eskimos for the work they had done for us. Of course all the walrus meat went to them, and also the meat from two more narwhal which had been captured while we were away, thanks to Dr. Rasmussen, who saw to it that everyone did all they could to get the specimens we wanted.

There really were three more narwhal, but one of them was a little one which Harry Raven preserved whole, embalming it. The skeletons and skulls of the others were taken. Also Kellerman made some interesting movies showing the work of landing the dead [126]narwhal on the beach and cutting them up. This was at night, when it was cloudy and not bright enough for pictures. So some of the men lit bright flares which Kellerman had, which lit up the beach with a queer bright light that was almost blinding.

When the narwhal were landed Kudluktoo and the others cut off great strips of the skin which they all love. These were handed around and all hands gobbled up the stuff in great shape. The way they eat this sort of thing is to put a big sliver in their mouth until it is stuffed full, and then cut off the end outside their lips with a knife. Why they don’t sometimes cut their noses or lips I don’t know. Anyway, it looked awfully funny and ought to be good in the picture.

I tried narwhal skin myself and don’t like it much. It’s sort of tough and seems to be swallowed without chewing. I think an auto tire inner tube would be about the same, only it would smell better. [127]

Pooadloona and another hunter we took over to Northumberland Island. That afternoon we got some more walrus but while we were fooling around taking some movies we lost two of the animals. I think this discouraged the Eskimos who couldn’t understand why the foolish white men would let good meat get away when they really had it killed, instead of trying crazy stunts for a man who looked into a machine and turned a crank. Anyway, there was one big walrus whose meat we took to Keate, the little town where we left these hunters. It was only a little way from the place where we had been wrecked.

In the evening we started across Baffin Bay to go to Jones Sound on the Canadian side. We had intended to go further north to Etah, which was only about sixty miles away. But it was getting pretty late in the season and the Morrissey was giving Cap’n Bob a good deal of worry. While she was [128]well patched up, she still leaked a bit and lots of places were sprung. For instance, the forward deck leaked so badly that when the walrus meat was piled on deck the blood dripped right down into our cabin and got on the table and especially into Bob Peary’s bunk. It just wasn’t possible to fix the deck, which had to be recaulked all over, until the vessel got to a shipyard.

Anyway, it seemed better not to go much further north. Also, we had to go back to Holsteinsborg on the Greenland side to get the Hobbs party. If it wasn’t for that Captain Bob would have gone to Etah.

After a day of fine going with some hours of a pretty stiff wind and rather rough sea, we arrived at the mouth of Jones Sound where we were greeted with a thick fog that put ice on all the rigging. After going quite a way up Jones Sound, hoping to get to the lower land where there might be musk-oxen, we were stopped by thick pan ice. Also new ice [129]was forming in the night. Evidently winter was just around the corner.

We turned around and went out again toward the mouth and then waited for the fog to clear up. There was lots of pan ice all around us and of course it wasn’t safe to risk getting caught by the ice too far in. A sudden change in the wind, for instance, might jam it all around us and keep us from getting out at all.

In the early afternoon the fog disappeared and we went in to Craig Harbor, on the north shore of the sound on Ellesmere Land. Dad, Rasmussen, Doc and Joe the sailor went ashore and reported that the station was closed. This is the most northerly police post in the world, occupied most of the time by the famous Northwest Mounted Police.

Much to our disappointment there was nobody at the station. We learned later they had moved to a new station further north on Ellesmere Land. We left a note [130]saying that we had been there. There were two main buildings, a barracks and a store house, with oil barrels and sacks of coal piled up around. It all looked very neat. The buildings themselves were locked.

Dressing a Walrus. Left to Right: Dan, Joe, Art, David and Carl.

When we left Craig Harbor we saw two big bearded seal on the ice quite a distance away. When the Morrissey got quite close to one Art Young shot him dead with a rifle with a beautiful shot right through the neck, and then he turned around and shot at the other. He hit him all right but he wriggled off the ice pan and most likely sank.

When they were getting the first seal Jim, the sailor, who is used to killing seal on the spring Newfoundland seal hunts, jumped on the pan and cracked the seal over the head with a heavy seal hook. This broke the skull and injured the specimen for scientific use. So I was told to keep a watch out for more as we very much wanted to get a perfect specimen. [131]

We were not sure that there were any walrus in Jones Sound. But soon Doc and I saw what we supposed were three big seals on pans of ice about a mile ahead of us. We were in the lookout with glasses. And our seal turned out to be walrus, and big ones, too.

We headed right for them and Carl and Doc and Cal and Dad got in the bow with their guns. When they were pretty near they shot and hit the walrus, but they didn’t kill him. It is pretty hard to kill one, and if they have any life left they slide off the ice into the water. The poor big walrus lifted himself on his flippers and looked around to see where the noise came from and what it was all about.

Art and a Dead Walrus on an Ice Pan in Jones Sound.

In the water they seem pretty fierce and getting at them is quite a job. But on the ice they seem very stupid and sort of pitiful and lumbering, like a huge big sleepy cow. Only of course those tusks are mighty dangerous, and I believe there isn’t an animal that [132]can fight with a walrus, even a polar bear. But they certainly can’t hear or see very well. And when they are asleep on the ice in the sun, if the water is quiet so the ice doesn’t rock and disturb them, it’s very easy indeed to get awfully close to them.

This big walrus, although hit three times, started to get off the ice. Then Carl finished him with Dan’s heavy rifle. So we left him dead on that pan and moved over to the other pan where two more were asleep. Both of them were hit with the first shots, but both managed to get into the water. Carl drove my harpoon, from the ship, into one of them, but the other sank, although Nielsen, Rasmussen’s man with us on this part of the trip almost got his harpoon into that one. It was a shame to lose him.

We all hate to kill anything and have it wasted. As a matter of fact I thought I was going to be awfully excited about killing things, but while it’s exciting all right I don’t [133]think I care an awful lot about it. Getting animals for food or for museums is all right. But I don’t believe I want any trophies just to look at. It seems fairer to get the fun of seeing them alive and to let them keep on up here. From what Dad says, and Cap’n Bob and the others, there must have been a great deal more game up here some years ago than there is now, and certainly other expeditions killed an awful lot. Also of course the Eskimos, now that they have rifles, kill a lot. And after a while, I suppose, the game will be all gone just as it is in most of our own west.

We saw another walrus not far off. The Morrissey got very close to him and Art put two arrows in his neck, shooting from the bowsprit so that a picture could be taken. The arrows might have killed him, for they certainly got in a long way and caused a lot of bleeding. But that would have taken some time, so the walrus was shot. [134]

None of these animals was wasted. Harry Raven took the brains for the Museum and the heads were kept by members of the expedition. While our crowd, I think, have had a pretty good time and certainly plenty of excitement, they have not had much real hunting. I know that Dad had hoped that the men who volunteered and came and have done lots of work would be able to get more fun out of it. So he is glad when there is a chance for them to get something to take back with them. The meat was saved for the Eskimos at Pond’s Inlet, where we were going.

[135]

That night in Jones Sound, after getting the walrus, was very beautiful. There was a great big full moon and a very pink and golden sunset. The sun really went down that night, although of course it stayed quite light. And it was the first time we had seen the moon for a long time. Both the sunset and the moon, one in the west, the other in the east, lasted all the night, reflected over a very thin coat of silvery new ice.

Dad and I stayed up all night. Dad shot a bearded seal on a pan, a pretty good shot getting him right through the head. Then Ralph got out on the pan and put a strap [136]around the seal and we hoisted him on board with a burton and were off again. A little while later we saw another big one on a pan and Dad tried a long shot and missed, shooting high. On the second shot he hit him, but the seal wriggled off and came to the surface in a few minutes. Dan and Dad went out in the skiff and tried to get him but they would go close to the place where he was and he would go down and come up at another place. There was no use shooting him unless they got close enough to put a seal hook in him, for he would just sink.

Enough for Several Fine Duck Messes.

After a while they gave up and started back. Then three seal came right up near them, popping out of the water to see what it was all about. But they dodged back too quick for a shot.

The new ice was forming quickly and the barometer was dropping. So we began to move out to the mouth of the Sound, as Cap’n Bob wanted to get out of there before [137]we might have trouble with the ice in case of a storm. Of course if it had been earlier in the season we would have liked to stay in Jones Sound, where there certainly was good hunting.

We watched and watched, but saw nothing more. We were working easterly following along the edge of big fields of floe ice, that is, floating pans, some of them just little pieces a few yards square, and others perhaps a hundred feet or more, or a number of pans floating about together, partly joined by new ice. You could almost see this new ice forming. The thermometer I suppose was about 25 degrees, or perhaps colder. Little crystals gathered together in the quiet water and then there was a thin sheet of rubbery ice. As the boat moved through it the surface held with a lot of strength. It would wave as the ripples from the bow worked out under it, and took a lot of pressure before it actually broke.

Enjoying Our Atwater Kent Radio.

[138]

It was just about four o’clock in the morning and I was going to turn in. I was cold. But it had been fun staying up and I don’t think I ever saw anything so beautiful as that light on the ice and the calm grey water, with the snowy mountains and dark cliffs and white glaciers on both sides of the sound.

Dan was still working, cleaning up his walrus head. Dad was at the bow. Ralph was at the wheel, and Jim on lookout.

“Bear! Bear!”

Suddenly Ralph called that out, in a low voice.

Jim rang for the engine to stop and at once the Captain, who was below getting a nap after being up about twenty-four hours, came on deck.

From where we were all that could be seen of the bear was a small yellow spot away over on the other side of a big pan. I was told to go aloft and keep my eyes on him and to yell if he went into the water. If a bear [139]gets into the water it is pretty easy to get him, for he doesn’t swim too fast to catch. But if he gets to land he is likely to get away. Cap’n Bob was afraid he might start across the big pan one way, as we went round the other.

Anyway, the Morrissey went around the pan and nosed up, very quietly, to within about thirty yards of him. The bear held his nose high in the air and then came toward the ship making a very pretty jump across some young ice. He seemed not a bit afraid, only very interested in this strange new huge animal that had come to bother him.

Cap’n Bob wanted to be sure for us to get this first bear, so several took a shot together. The rifles of Dad and Dan and Doc all blazed out together and later we found that each shot hit and that any one of them apparently would have been fatal.

Jim and Ralph jumped out on the ice from the bowsprit and made a line fast to the dead [140]bear and he was hoisted aboard and laid up forward, the rest of the deck being pretty full of walrus meat and skins and heads. About that time we looked pretty messy and like a butcher shop, but right away, as the barometer was falling and it felt like snow, all hands went to work and kept at it until breakfast, by which time things were pretty shipshape.

Kellerman “Shoots” Some Eskimos of Inglefield Gulf.

After that, by the way, we had a wonderful assortment of meat. There was walrus heart and meat, and bear meat hanging in the rigging and a big bunch of auks and murres hanging in the shrouds, and also some fine seal meat. Some of this seal we ate at dinner that next day, boiled not very much, and it certainly was fine. So for some time we had a pretty fine meat diet.

Right away, too, Billy boiled out a couple of bottles of bear oil for Dad and Rasmussen. This is great stuff for shoes and leather.

And speaking of bear, I now have two complete [141]outfits of Eskimo clothing. The northern kind has nanookies, or bear pants. Nette made these on board from a part of a skin Dr. Rasmussen gave Dad, and at Karnah when we stopped the Eskimo women there chewed it up in their teeth so that the hide became very soft and easy to work. Then there are sealskin boots with rabbit fur inside and a sealskin netcha or jacket with a hood to go over the head. It is a wonderfully warm and comfortable rig, this northern outfit.

This bear of ours, they said, was a four-year-old. He measured seven feet and four inches long and they guessed he weighed close to six hundred pounds. Later on Fred fixed up the skin and the head to be taken back and made into a rug. I worked on the skull, which takes quite a lot of work to clean all the flesh off.

Kudluktoo and Matak Show David the Right Way to Eat Narwhal Hide, a Prized Eskimo Delicacy.

So that made a pretty exciting finish to a really wonderful day. We were sorry for [142]just one thing. There wasn’t enough light at that time of the morning or late night to get any pictures of the bear. Anyway, in about eight hours we had got walrus and bearded seal and then the pride of it all, Nanook the bear.

And a funny part of it is that just the night before, Dad had sent a radio to Mother saying that pretty soon he hoped to find a bear on one of the ice pans, and that his skin was mortgaged to make a rug for my little brother June to play on in front of the fire this winter.

Then so soon after that we got the bear and the rug for Junie!

[143]

On August twenty-eighth after a long time in very thick fog we at last saw land only a little way off. For a couple of days we had been working down the coast of Devon Island and Bylot Island, wanting to get to Pond’s Inlet where there is a station of the Northwest Mounted Police and also a post of the Hudson Bay Company.

Cap’n Bob had not been able to see land or to take any observations but we knew pretty well from dead reckoning that we had reached the south shore of Pond’s Inlet. “Dead reckoning,” you know, means finding out where you are by the record of the number of miles the log shows the ship has [144]travelled. The log itself is a little instrument like a small propeller which is let out on a long rope at the stern; it turns around fast or slow according to the speed at which the boat travels, and the revolutions it makes are recorded showing the number of knots, or sea miles, covered.

While we were drifting around in the fog, barely in sight of the high land which now and then showed through the fog, Dad and Dr. Rasmussen paddled about a bit in a small boat shooting murres and dovekies. In quite a short time Dad shot fifty-one, which made several meals for the crowd.

Then later we put the dory over with the Johnson engine in it. It made a good little boat to go ahead and see how deep the water was. One of the sailors was in her using the lead and calling back to the Morrissey the depths of water he found.

After a few miles of groping along that way we stopped near shore where a little stream [145]came down right beside a glacier. We only had a few gallons of water left on board in the big tank, and nearly all the casks were empty. While the crew took the casks ashore and filled them, Bob Peary, Ed Manley and I went out rowing in the fog looking for seal. We’d seen quite a few during the day. Of course we didn’t get out of sight of land, but kept going down along the shore, so we could find our way back. You really could see only about a hundred yards.

We shot at a couple of seal but missed them. They are pretty hard to hit in the water. They come up just for a minute or even a few seconds and take a look at you if you are close and then dive. We were just going after another which seemed to be keeping pretty well on the surface when we heard the fog horn on the Morrissey. That was a signal that we should come back.

A little later we went ashore and on a rocky hillside found a whaler’s grave. He [146]was a harpooner on a famous whaler, the Diana, of Dundee, Scotland, and was buried there in 1903. Some other whalers’ graves not far away were a hundred years old, for there were many of them up here as early as that. During some seasons, I was told, as many as a couple of thousand men would be in these waters and some vessels wintered in little harbors along the coast. Now the whales are about all gone and the whalers are out of business.

The fog cleared up later in the day and we made our way to Albert Harbor which was one of the old whaler’s headquarters. There are high cliffs on all sides so it is wonderfully well protected and the water is very deep. In the old days they used to bring the vessels right up to the rock slides at the foot of the cliffs and put ballast on.

Then we went on further up the Inlet, which really is a broad sound mostly a dozen miles wide to the place where the Hudson [147]Bay Company’s post is. Right next to the Post is the detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The Police have a barracks and a store house, and the H. B. C. about the same, with a store too. Then down along the beach are a dozen little shacks and some sod houses, the homes of the natives who live there. But most of the Eskimos in that part of the country live far away from the post, in villages out where the hunting is better.

There were six white men, three of the Police and three H. B. C. Maurice Timbury was the constable in charge for the Police and George Dunn is the factor at the H. B. C. Everyone was most awfully nice to us and they gave us a grand time. We had dinner with the Police and then a dance at the H. B. C. house, which was very lively and lots of fun. The music was a Victrola and the Eskimos came in and danced. Also Nette, the Greenland girl whom we are taking [148]around to Holsteinsborg, was quite the belle of the ball. She dances well and Dr. Rasmussen is a great dancer.

The Eskimos here in Baffin Land seem to be much different from those in Greenland. The women tattoo their faces and wear different sorts of clothes. Just there at the Post, where they get lots of white men’s things, the native clothing isn’t seen much and I don’t believe that so much “store” food is so very good for them. Anyway, the crowd I saw seemed sort of puny and soft compared with the fine husky fellows we had been seeing on the other side of Baffin Bay. The kayaks over here seemed bigger and wider than those of the Greenland Eskimos.

The meat from the walrus we had killed up on Jones Sound we brought to Pond’s Inlet and gave it to the natives there. They seemed very pleased, for it is fine dog food and they do not get walrus in those waters any more. In return for our gifts some women [149]came on board and finished fleshing off the walrus and seal skins which we had not done yet. Then they were salted some more and put in barrels and headed up to go back to the Museum. It was a terrible job to get the grease off the decks and for a few days after they were as slippery as a skating rink.

We went down to some old Eskimo winter houses, or stone igloos a mile or so from the Station. They were very old and were used by a people so many years ago that the present Eskimos don’t know anything about them and believe that they were quite a different race. Dr. Rasmussen says that from the things found in this old village, compared with others that have been studied, the people lived there probably about a thousand years ago and in some places even earlier and about the time the Norsemen first came to Greenland in the year one thousand and later.

These old Eskimo stone igloos are built in [150]a circle, mostly about fifteen feet or a little more across. There is a small outer room which is the entrance hall, chiefly to keep the inner place warmer. It is so low that they must have had to creep in on their hands and knees. After creeping in there seems to be a kind of step up into the inner room. The main room, I guess, was about five feet high, with a raised platform all around it a couple of feet above the central floor which is just a sort of small square in the middle.

Dr. Rasmussen Shows David an Ancient Eskimo Harpoon Head.

In one corner of the raised part, usually near the door, the cooking was done. The platform at the back was used for sleeping, and it is all built up very neatly with flat stones, the walls made of stone and turf and whale bone. The roof was flat rock and bone. In some places whale ribs seem to have been used as rafters to support the walls and perhaps the ceiling. They certainly must have been very warm and strong houses. I forgot to say that they really are partly [151]under ground, for the floor level is usually a couple of feet lower than the level of the outer ground.

We did some digging around these houses and at some of the old graves. And the next day Dad and I and Dan went with Mr. Gall and his assistant, Abraham Ford of Labrador, in their motor boat twelve miles along the Inlet to some other old houses.

We found a few very nice things like spear heads and snow knives made of bone and ivory, harpoon handles and a little cup or dish carved out of bone. Later on Dad got from some of the white men the things they had collected so that altogether we got together quite a fine lot of very interesting things. And many of them really came from the “stone age” of these people, when they made everything they had from stone, like flint arrowheads, or from bone or ivory.

Two Arctic Hare from Pond’s Inlet.

It is quite wonderful to know that with these very primitive weapons which they [152]made themselves they were able to kill the huge sperm whales. Yet of course they did, for their houses are surrounded with the bones. And in the old times these waters surely were just full of whale, walrus, seal and narwhal.

Timbury and the two other constables, Murray and Dunn, went with us in the afternoon hunting for Arctic hare. We saw one but couldn’t get near enough because one of the dogs had followed and would chase it every time we got in sight. Ed shot one duck and I shot two on a little lake about two miles from the settlement. We didn’t know how to get them so Ed took off his clothes and waded out in the icy water up to his armpits and got them.

Here at Pond’s Inlet, by the way, is the most northerly radio station in the world. Both the Police and H. B. C. have a short wave receiving set, and the Police also have a low power sending set, which I guess doesn’t [153]work very well. In Mr. Gall’s house we were interested to see our old friends the Eveready Batteries which he uses entirely. Dad arranged with them to have a special program, for a few minutes anyway, on the Eveready hour later in November, if it could be fixed up. That is, he wanted to have part of a program of broadcasting in New York arranged so that it would be directed right at Pond’s Inlet and they up there could hear Dad in New York talking to them.

When we left the settlement it was so windy and rough that we stopped at Albert Harbor again. Art and Ed and I went ashore on the steep rocky island to look for hares. We climbed the first hill and saw a lot of sign but no hares.

“There’s one!” All of a sudden Art called out. “Over there by the big rock. Dave, you sneak over behind that pile of rocks and Ed and I will stay here and attract his attention.” [154]

I crept slowly toward the side of the hill and when I was out of sight of the hare I ran for all I was worth and then slowed down and looked carefully over the top. There he was, about sixty yards away, looking at Art and Ed.

I aimed in a hurry and shot and he tumbled right over in his tracks. The twenty-two bullet went right through his shoulders and into his heart and out the other side. We saw that his back was a light greyish color and that he was a lot bigger than the largest American rabbits. In winter, I’m told, they get pure white.

We chased another all over the place and almost lost him. Just by luck I had gone around the other way from the others and saw his ears sticking up a long way off. I whistled to make him stand up, but when he did I missed and he started running. I shot at him on the run and with a lot of luck got him right through the hips and backbone. He [155]was larger than the first one, and pure white.

We tried some others but with no luck. It was about ten o’clock when we got back to the boat, and almost dark. Beginning here at Pond’s Inlet we have had our first real nights. The sun sets and for some hours it gets dark.

Anyway, I asked Dad to send a radio message to Mother telling her that I am fixing up a couple of nice Arctic hare skins for her, to make a collar or something out of. And Fred is showing me how to make powder puffs out of the tails.

[156]