Captain Inglefield—Dr. Kane—The open Polar Sea—Hans Hendrik the Greenlander—Kalutunah the Eskimo—An Eskimo bear-hunt—A lesson in catching auks—Dr. Hayes—His journey over the glacier—Tyndall Glacier—Captain C. F. Hall—Joe and Hannah—Voyage of the Polaris—Drift of the Polaris—The voyage on the ice-floe—The British Government Expedition of 1875—The Alert and Discovery—The cairn on Washington Irving Island—Discovery Harbour—How the Alert got into safety at Floeberg Beach—Low temperatures—Nares on sledging—Description of the sledges and their burden—Markham starts for the Pole—Reaches 83° 20´ 26?—Outbreak of scurvy—Parr's walk—Aldrich's journey west—Beaumont's journey east—The perilous homeward voyage.

Lady Franklin, who incidentally did so much for Arctic discovery, sent out the Isabel in 1852 under Commander, afterwards Sir, Edward Augustus Inglefield to search for her husband to the north of Baffin Bay. Unlike John Ross, the names of whose ships, Isabella and Alexander, are home by the capes at its entrance, he found Smith Sound to be the highway to the north. Steaming up the open water "stretching through seven points of the compass," noting the coasts as he went, he was turned back by the ice in 78° 28´, at the entrance to the Kane Sea, with Cairn Point and the way in to Rensselaer Harbour on his right, and Cape Sabine and Ellesmere Land, which he named, on his left; the farthest north he sighted being Cape Louis Napoleon, the farthest east Cape Frederick VII, now known as Cape Russell. Needless to say he found no Franklin traces, although he really looked for them.

Twelve months afterwards Dr. Elisha Kent Kane in the United States brig Advance followed in his track and wintered in Rensselaer Harbour, nine miles further north. Ostensibly Kane was on a Franklin search, but his real object was the Pole. He explored the sea named after him, naming many landmarks, not always placing them in their true positions, and underwent many hardships. For one mistake he was famous for a time, and his reputation now suffers. One of his expedition, William Morton, almost reached Cape Constitution, in about 80½°, which he placed some sixty miles too far north, and described as the corner of the north coast of Greenland; and from the southern horn of the bay of which it is the northern boundary he looked out over the south of Kennedy Channel, which is open every summer, and mistook it for the Polar Sea. And he returned with a report of an even more wonderful discovery than the Polar Sea, for, according to the illustration, he beheld the midnight sun dipping in its waters on Midsummer Day.

In May, 1854, the month before Morton's discoveries, Dr. Hayes and William Godfrey crossed the Kane Sea to connect the northern coast with Inglefield's survey, "but it disclosed no channel or any form of exit from the bay," being, in fact, Ellesmere Land continued, and yet on reaching the shore for the first time at Hayes Point, three miles north of Cape Louis Napoleon, and following it for two miles to Cape Frazer, they quite unnecessarily named the country Grinnell Land. On the other side of this sea the chief discovery was Kane's Humboldt glacier, some fifty miles north-east of their winter quarters, which was described as "the mighty crystal bridge which connects the two continents of America and Greenland," when, of course, it does nothing of the sort.

What with sickness, accident, and other disaster, it became evident that the Advance would never leave her wintering place, and in July Kane set off on a wild endeavour to reach Beechey Island and obtain relief from the Franklin search vessels, but he had to return. Next month Hayes was sent to Upernivik, but he also came back. Finally in May, 1855, the brig was abandoned and the survivors began their journey to the south. Fortunately on the outward voyage Kane, at Fiskernaes, had engaged Hans Hendrik the Greenlander, then a boy of nineteen, who became quite a prominent figure in this and subsequent voyages, and without him and Kalutunah, chief of the Etah Eskimos, the whole party would have perished miserably.

Hans first appears when spearing a bird on the wing; Kalutunah's first appearance was equally encouraging. "The leader of the party," says Kane, "was a noble savage, greatly superior in everything to the others of his race. He greeted me with respectful courtesy, yet as one who might rightfully expect an equal measure of it in return, and, after a short interchange of salutations, seated himself in the post of honour at my side. I waited, of course, till the company had fed and slept, for among savages especially haste is indecorous, and then, after distributing a few presents, opened to them my project of a northern exploration. Kalutunah received his knife and needles with a 'Kuyanaka,' 'I thank you'; the first thanks I have heard from a native of this upper region. He called me his friend—'Asakaoteet,' 'I love you well'—and would be happy, he said, to join the nalegak-soak in a hunt."

And the journey ended in a hunt, for the dogs caught sight of a large male bear in the act of devouring a seal. The impulse was irresistible; Kane lost all control over both dogs and drivers, who seemed dead to everything but the passion of pursuit. Off they sped with incredible speed; the Eskimos clinging to their sledges and cheering their dogs with loud cries. A mad, wild chase, wilder than German legend—"the dogs, wolves; the drivers, devils." After a furious run, the animal was brought to bay, and the lance and rifle did their work. There were more bears and more hunts, and when Kane objected that this could hardly be called northern exploration, he was told by Kalutunah, significantly, that the bear-meat was absolutely necessary for the support of their families, and that the nalegak-soak had no right to prevent him from providing for his household. "It was a strong argument," says Kane, "and withal the argument of the strong."

Bear-hunting hereabouts has its dangers, for the Eskimos of the north are not armed with bows and arrows as are those of the mainland. When the bear is found the dogs are set upon the trail, and the hunter runs by their side in silence. As he turns the angle ahead his game is in view before him, stalking probably along with quiet march, sometimes sniffing the air suspiciously, but making, nevertheless, for a clump of hummocks. The dogs spring forward, opening in a wild wolfish yell, the driver shrieking "Nannook! nannook!" and all straining every nerve in pursuit. The bear rises on his haunches, views his pursuers, and starts off at full speed. The hunter, as he runs, leaning over his sledge, seizes the traces of a couple of his dogs and liberates them from their burden. It is the work of a minute; for the speed is not checked and the remaining dogs rush on with apparent ease. Pressed more severely, the bear stands at bay while his two foremost pursuers halt at a short distance and quietly await the arrival of the hunter. At this moment the whole pack are liberated; the hunter grasps his lance, and, stumbling through the snow and ice, prepares for the encounter. Grasping the lance firmly in his hands he provokes the animal to pursue him by moving rapidly across its path, and then running as if to escape. But hardly is its long body extended for the tempting chase, before, with a quick jump, the hunter doubles on his track, and, as the bear turns after him again, the lance is plunged into the left side below the shoulder; and that so dexterously, that, if it be an inch or so wide of the proper spot, the spear has to be left in the bear and the man has to run for his life.

At this hazardous work Kalutunah was an adept, and he was equally skilful at a much less dangerous game, as Dr. Hayes was to discover when wintering in the schooner United States in Foulke Harbour, further south, in 1860-61. Hayes wished to learn how to catch auks, and the Eskimo gave him a lesson. Kalutunah carried a small net, made of light strings of sealskin knitted together, the staff by which it was held being about ten feet in length. Arriving about half-way up the cliffs he crouched behind a rock and invited the doctor to follow his example. The slope on which the birds were congregated was about a mile long, and in vast flocks they were sweeping over it a few feet above the stones down the whole length of the hill, returning higher in the air, and so round and round in a complete circuit. Occasionally a few hundreds or thousands would drop down as if following some leader, and in an instant the rocks, for some distance, would swarm with them as they speckled the hill with their black backs and white breasts. The doctor was told to lie lower, as the birds noticed him and were flying too far overhead. Having placed himself as Kalutunah approved, the birds began to sweep lower and lower in their flight until their track came well within reach. Then, as a dense portion of the crowd approached, up went the net, and half a dozen birds flew into it, and, stunned by the blow, could not recover before the Eskimo had slipped the staff through his hands and seized the net. With his left hand he pressed down the birds, while with the right he drew them out one by one, and, for want of a third hand, used his teeth to crush their heads. The wings were then locked across each other; and with an air of triumph the old chief looked around, spat the blood and feathers from his mouth, and went on with the sport, tossing up his net and hauling it in with much rapidity until he had caught about a hundred, and wanted no more.

Hayes did his best to disparage both Kalutunah and Hans, to whom he was not quite so much indebted as Kane, owing to his having given himself a better chance of retreat by not taking the schooner out of Smith Sound, his quarters in Hartstene Bay being only some twelve miles north of Cape Alexander. He had come to verify the existence of the open sea and sail to the Pole across it if he could; and he verified it to his own satisfaction. But he did not get so far north as Morton, although he claimed to have done so, for he climbed a cliff eight hundred feet high and looked out over the open water—in Kennedy Channel—and did not see the Greenland cliffs trending away northwards within thirty miles of him, and visible all the way up for two degrees north of Cape Constitution. Thus he left the map as Kane left it, with Greenland cut off short south of the eighty-first parallel, and his farthest seems to have been the south point of Rawlings Bay, where the Alert was forced on shore in August, 1876, in 80° 15´.

"I climbed," he says, "the steep hillside to the top of a ragged cliff, which I supposed to be about eight hundred feet above the level of the sea. The view which I had from this elevation furnished a solution of the cause of my progress being arrested on the previous day. The ice was everywhere in the same condition as in the mouth of the bay across which I had endeavoured to pass. A broad crack, starting from the middle of the bay, stretched over the sea, and uniting with other cracks as it meandered to the eastward, it expanded as the delta of some mighty river discharging into the ocean, and under a water-sky, which hung upon the northern horizon, it was lost in the open sea. The sea beneath me was a mottled sheet of white and dark patches, these latter being either soft decaying ice or places where the ice had wholly disappeared. These spots were heightened in intensity of shade and multiplied in size as they receded, until the belt of the water-sky blended them all together into one uniform colour of dark blue. The old and solid floes (some a quarter of a mile, and others miles across) and the massive ridges and wastes of hummocked ice which lay piled between them and around their margins, were the only parts of the sea which retained the whiteness and solidity of winter."

Unfortunately for Hayes, the astronomer of the expedition, August Sonntag, who had assisted Kane in the same capacity, was frozen to death on a sledge journey, and the doctor was left to do the work for himself, with disappointing results, as with errors of many miles in either latitude or longitude his journeys can only be noticed in a very general way. In October, 1860, he proceeded for some distance over the glacier to the east of his wintering place. The first attempt to scale the glacier was attended by what might have been a serious accident. The foremost member of the party missed his footing as he was clambering up the rude steps, and, sliding down the steep side, scattered those who were below him to the right and left and sent them rolling into the valley beneath. The next effort was more successful, and, the end of a rope being carried over the side of the glacier, the sledge was drawn up the inclined plane and a fair start obtained. A little further on Hayes was only saved from disappearing down a crevasse by clutching a pole he was carrying on his shoulder. Next day, the surface being smoother, more progress was made, and they reached a plain of compact snow covered with a crust through which the feet broke at every step. The day afterwards the cold grew more intense and a gale came on. At night the men complained bitterly and could not sleep, and as the storm increased in strength they were forced to leave the tent and by active exercise prevent themselves from freezing.

To face the wind was impossible, and shelter was nowhere to be found upon the unbroken plain, there being but one direction in which they could move, that being with their backs to the gale. It was not without difficulty that the tent was taken down and bundled upon the sledge, the wind blowing so fiercely that they could scarcely roll it up with their stiffened hands. The men were in pain and could only hold on for a few moments to the hardened canvas, their fingers, freezing continually, requiring vigorous pounding to keep them on the flickering verge of life. "In the midst of a vast frozen Sahara, with neither hill, mountain, nor gorge anywhere in view," says Hayes, "fitful clouds swept over the face of the full-orbed moon, which, descending toward the horizon, glimmered through the drifting snow that whirled out of the illimitable distance, and scudded over the icy plain, to the eye in undulating lines of downy softness, to the flesh in showers of piercing darts. Our only safety was in flight; and like a ship driven before a tempest which she cannot withstand, and which has threatened her ruin, we turned our backs to the gale; and, hastening down the slope, we ran to save our lives. We travelled upwards of forty miles, and had descended about three thousand feet before we ventured to halt."

Next year he visited the large glacier in Whale Sound which he named after Professor John Tyndall, pulling first along its front in a boat and then mounting its surface. As he rowed along within a few fathoms of this two miles of ice, he found the face "worn and wasted away until it seemed like the front of some vast incongruous temple, here a groined roof of some huge cathedral, and there a pointed window or a Norman doorway deeply moulded; while on all sides were pillars round and fluted and pendants dripping crystal drops of the purest water, and all bathed in a soft blue atmosphere. Above these wondrous archways and galleries there was still preserved the same Gothic character; tall spires and pinnacles rose along the entire front and multiplied behind them, and new forms met the eye continually. Strange, there was nothing cold or forbidding anywhere. The ice seemed to take the warmth which suffused the air, and I longed to pull my boat far within the opening and paddle beneath the Gothic archways."

Charles Francis Hall, of Cincinnati, was a man of a very different stamp. He was a genius and a genuine worker, an accurate observer and painstaking explorer who believed above all things in thoroughness. Realising that the best way to study the Polar regions was to understand the Eskimos, who know most about them, and utilise their local knowledge, he settled amongst them, lived with them, adopted their customs, and became as one of them in their huts and tents, taking part in their sports and hardships. Two friends he made amongst them, Ebierbing and his wife Tookoolito, better known as Joe and Hannah, who accompanied him till he died.

After clearing up the Frobisher problem and throwing some light on the Franklin mystery, he started in 1871 to go as far north as he could across the reported Polar Sea. To him Henry Grinnell, who did so much for northern discovery, entrusted the American flag which had been to the Antarctic with Wilkes in 1838, to the Arctic with De Haven, with Kane and with Hayes, and was a sort of oriflamme of Polar discovery. His ship was the Polaris, of 387 tons, once the Periwinkle, a name which seemed to be a little too unassuming. Buddington, his sailing-master, was an experienced whaling captain; his assistant, Tyson, destined for the independent command of an ice-floe, was another whale-fisher. The naturalist was Emil Bessels. On board were also Joe and Hannah—of course—and William Morton, to show where the sea was, and, picked up at Upernivik, the indispensable Hans Hendrik with his wife and three children.

The voyage was fortunate so long as Hall lived. The Polaris found the Polar gates open before her. She steamed right up Smith Sound, through Kane Sea, up Kennedy Channel, into Robeson Channel—named after the Secretary to the American Navy—until she reached the ice, in 82° 16´, on the 30th of August, 1871, the highest latitude then attained by a ship. Hall would have pressed on into the ice, but Buddington wisely refused, and hardly had the Polaris been headed round when she was beset and carried southwards, to escape in a few days and take refuge for the winter in a harbour on the east of what is now known as Hall Basin, protected at its entrance by a grounded floeberg. The latitude is 81° 38´, the harbour Hall called Thank God Bay. There in November he died; and close by is Hall's Rest, where he is buried.

His death was the end of the enterprise. Buddington wished to return as soon as the ship was released, and eventually had his way, after a journey or two of little importance. But he stayed too long. The ship was clear in June, and he did not start until the 1st of August, and he started by driving her into the pack, anchored her to a floe, and drifted helplessly into Baffin Bay, as De Haven had done through Lancaster Sound in 1850. For eleven weeks the drift continued until she was off Northumberland Island on the 15th of October. Here in the middle of the night a violent gale arose, and the crippled ship, nipped between two masses of ice, was lifted bodily and thrown on her side, her timbers cracking loudly and her sides apparently breaking in. Two boats, all she had, were hurriedly got on to the ice, and provisions, stores, and clothing were being passed out, when with a roar the floe broke asunder, and the Polaris disappeared like a phantom in the gale. As the ice cracked and the sides lurched apart, a bundle of fur lay across the fissure. A grab was made at it, and the bundle was saved. It contained the baby of Joe the Eskimo, whose wife had been confined the year before in latitude 82°, perhaps the most northerly birthplace of any of this world's inhabitants.

On the ice were Tyson, with Sergeant Meyer, the steward, the cook, six sailors, and nine Eskimos, men, women, and children, including Hans and Joe. They built a house, from the materials thrown out from the ship, as a shelter; and they built snow houses as the time went on and the floe diminished. Provisions they had but few, but Hans and Joe were indefatigable. They speared seals, caught fish, trapped birds, and, sometimes, a bear would scramble up on to the ice for them to shoot—and they never missed. In short, without them the party would have starved to death.

The floe on which the castaways passed the winter was about a hundred yards long and seventy-five broad. On this they voyaged down the whole length of Baffin Bay and through Davis Strait, the ice melting away and getting smaller and smaller as they drifted south, until on the 1st of April, when it was only twenty yards round, they had to take to the remaining boat, the other having been used for fuel. Once they nearly touched the shore, but the wind rose and off they were driven in the snow. When they were picked up by the sealer Tigress in 53° 35´, near the coast of Labrador, on the 30th of April, they had drifted fifteen hundred miles in the hundred and ninety-six days that had elapsed since they left the ship.

The Polaris, blown to the northward, reached land at Lifeboat Cove in the entrance to Smith Sound, a little north of Foulke Harbour, and here with the aid of the Etah Eskimos the crew passed the winter; and, in the spring, some of them went on an expedition in the Hayes country and lost the famous flag. As the ship could not be made seaworthy, two flat-bottomed boats were built of her materials, and on the 21st of June these were found hauled up on a floe in Melville Bay, and their people rescued by the whaler Ravenscraig, which shifted them into the Arctic, another Dundee whaler, on board of which was Commander Markham, who, with Hans Hendrik, four years afterwards, was to follow up Hall's track to the north.

The results of this expedition were of considerable importance. In five days Captain Hall had run five hundred miles through what on most occasions has been found to be an ice-choked sea. He completed the exploration of Kennedy Channel, discovered Hall Basin and Robeson Channel, and was the first to reach the Polar ocean by this route. Greenland and Grinnell Land he extended northward for nearly a hundred and forty miles; and, north of Petermann Fiord, where he showed that the inland ice terminated, he had found a large area free from ice, with its wild flowers and herbage and musk oxen.

Hall's remarkable success in taking a ship to so high a latitude led to the Government expedition of 1875, the first British attempt to reach the Pole since Parry's failure in 1827. Three ships were employed: the Alert, a seventeen-gun sloop; the Discovery, once the Bloodhound, a Dundee whaler; and the Valorous. The Alert and Discovery were specially prepared for the voyage at Portsmouth by Sir Leopold M'Clintock who was then Admiral Superintendent of the dockyard; the Valorous, an old paddle sloop, required little alteration, as her duty was merely to carry the stores that could not safely be taken by the exploring vessels in crossing the Atlantic and hand them over at Disco.

The leader, Captain George Strong Nares, when one of the Franklin search officers under Kellett at Melville Island, had distinguished himself by a sledge journey in which he had travelled nine hundred and eighty miles in sixty-nine days and reached 119½° west longitude. He was known as one of the best navigators in the Navy, and when called upon to go to the north was in command of H.M.S. Challenger, then on her famous voyage of scientific exploration in very different seas. With him in the Alert was Commander Albert Hastings Markham, whose experience, varied and considerable, gained by his spending much of his spare time within the Arctic Circle, rendered him especially well fitted for the position. In command of the Discovery was Captain Henry Frederick Stephenson; and the officers of both ships were, like the crews, all specially selected. There was no difficulty in the manning. One commanding officer called at the office at Portsmouth where the men were being entered and asked for advice. "An order," he said, "has come on board my ship, directing me to send volunteers for Arctic service to this office. What am I to do? The whole ship's company, nearly eight hundred men, have given in their names."

The three ships left Spithead on the 29th of May, 1875, and were all at Godhavn on the 6th of July. Nine days afterwards they left for Ritenbenk of the curious name, which is an anagram of that of Berkentin who was in charge of the Greenland department when it was founded. Here the Valorous parted company to return home after filling up with fuel at the coal quarries on the north side of Disco Island, while the two ships went to Proven to pick up Hans Hendrik, who this time left his wife and children behind him.

Through Smith Sound, almost choked with ice, progress was slow and difficult; but the passage was safely accomplished, and so across Kane Sea and up Kennedy Channel. On Washington Irving Island an ancient cairn was found, evidently the work of white men's hands and of great age, as shown by the state of the lichens on it—yet another of the many indications in the Polar regions that there was always a somebody before the first on record. Crossing the mouth of Archer Fiord, a snug harbour was found in 81° 44´, where the Discovery was left to spend the winter, the Alert going on, hampered much by the floes, though helped at last by a south-westerly wind, until she had to stop in 82° 27´ on the shore of the Polar Ocean, at what was named Floeberg Beach, off an open coast and with no more protection during the winter than was afforded by masses of ice ranging up to sixty feet in height aground in from eight to twelve fathoms of water.

"The protected space," says Nares, "available for shelter was so contracted and shallow, the entrance to it so small, and the united force of the wind and flood-tide so powerful, that it was with much labour and no trifling expense in broken hawsers that the ship was hauled in stem foremost. It was a close race whether the ice or the ship would be in first, and my anxiety was much relieved when I saw the ship's bow swing clear into safety just as the advancing edge of the heavy pack closed in against the outside of our friendly barrier of ice. From our position of comparative security the danger we had so narrowly escaped was strikingly apparent as we gazed with wonder and awe at the power exerted by the ice driven past us to the eastward with irresistible force by the wind and flood-tide at the rate of about a mile an hour. The projecting points of each passing floe which grounded near the shore in about ten fathoms of water would be at once wrenched off from its still moving parent mass; the pressure continuing, the several pieces, frequently thirty thousand tons in weight, would be forced up the inclined shore, rising slowly and majestically ten or twelve feet above their old line of flotation. Such pieces quickly accumulated until a rampart-like barrier of solid ice-blocks, measuring about two hundred yards in breadth and rising fifty feet high, lined the shore, locking us in, but effectually protecting us from the overwhelming power of the pack." The land had already assumed a wintry aspect, and the ship soon put on a garb of snow and ice, each spar and rope being double its ordinary thickness from the accumulation of rime. Around her everything was white and solemn; no voice of bird or beast was heard; all was still and silent save the gathering floes; and in two days the men were able to walk on shore over the new ice.

For eleven months she stayed here, secured by cables to anchors frozen on to the shore to protect her from gales on the landward side. With the ship housed in awnings of tilt-cloth, with snow a foot thick laid on the upper deck and banked up on each side as high as the main-chains, with skylights and hatchways carefully covered up, except two hatchways for ingress and egress constructed with porches and double doors so as to prevent the entrance of the bitter air, the crew here passed the long Polar night. On the 11th of October the sun disappeared, and then began those entertainments, lectures, lessons, games, not forgetting the Royal Arctic Theatre which opened on the 18th of November, with which the winter was pleasantly whiled away. "Can you sing or dance? or what can you do for the amusement of others?" every man had been asked before he was chosen, and the result was a singularly happy time kept up until sunrise.

The cold was intense and long-continued. Even the tobacco pipes froze, the stem becoming solidly clogged with ice as the smoking went on unless it was made so short as to bring the bowl unpleasantly close to the mouth. On the 1st of April the temperature was down to minus 64°, and three days afterwards it was a hundred and five below freezing, the cold weather preventing the departure of the dog-sledge for Discovery Bay.

During the autumn, sledging parties had laid out reserves of stores for the spring journeys, and a certain amount of practice had been given to the men in what was intended to be the chief work of the expedition. The field, however, was not promising. On one occasion Nares went out to look at it. He obtained a fine view of the pack for a distance of six miles from the land. The southern side of each purely white snow-covered hummock was brilliantly lighted by the orange-tinted twilight. The stranded floebergs lining the shore extended from half to three-quarters of a mile off the land. Outside were old floes with undulating upper surfaces separated from each other by Sherard Osborn's "hedgerows of Arctic landscape," otherwise ridges of pressed-up ice of every size. "It will be as difficult," was his verdict, "to drag a sledge over such ice as to transport a carriage directly across country in England." He gave a lecture on sledging at one of the winter entertainments. It was interesting but not encouraging. He told his hearers that if they could imagine the hardest work they had ever been called upon to perform in their lives intensified to the utmost degree, it would only be as child's play in comparison with the work they would have to perform whilst sledging. "These prophetic words," says Markham, "were fully realised, and were often recalled and commented on by the men."

They had four different kinds of sledges. From the illustrations it will appear how the eight-feet sledges differed from those used by M'Clintock, the Nares sledge being higher and more slender in the uprights. The eight-men sledge, such as the Marco Polo—which was bound for the Pole—had six uprights eighteen inches apart. It was eleven feet long, thirty-eight inches wide, eleven inches high, and weighed one hundred and thirty pounds. The tent, made of light, unbleached duck, was nine feet four inches long at the bottom, eight feet at the top, seven feet wide and high, and weighed forty-four pounds. The tent poles, five in number, weighed five pounds apiece. The coverlet weighed thirty-one pounds and a half, and the extra coverlet twenty pounds. The lower robe weighed twenty-three pounds, the waterproof floor-cloth fifteen. The eight sleeping-bags weighed eight pounds apiece, and the eight knapsacks, when packed, twelve pounds apiece. The shovel and two pickaxes accounted for twenty-one pounds, the store-bag for twenty-five, the cooking gear for twenty-nine, the gun and ammunition for twenty-five, the medical stores for twelve, the instruments for fifteen, and the tent for nine and a quarter. To this must be added a thousand and eighty pounds for forty-five days' provisions for the eight men, and we have the total of sixteen hundred and sixty-four pounds odd, which with seven men at the ropes gives each man a drag of about two hundred and thirty-eight pounds. In the spring the weight decreases as the provisions are consumed, but the rate of decrease is not the same in the autumn, for then the steadily falling temperature increases the weight of the outfit by the moisture it adds to the tent and clothing. In Markham's autumn journey the tent of thirty-two pounds came back as fifty-five, the coverlet as forty-eight, the lower robe as forty, the floor-cloth as forty, and everything else was heavier than at the start.

The sledges mustered for their journeys on the 3rd of April. Seven in number, they were drawn up in single line according to the seniority of the leaders, all fully equipped and provisioned, and manned by fifty-three officers and men. On each was its commander's banner—a swallow-tailed flag charged with a St. George's cross and displaying the armorial bearings. As a precaution against snow-blindness, the men had been ordered to decorate the backs of their snow-jumpers with any device they thought fit, the result being a display of comic blazonry that often formed a topic of conversation when others failed. For the same reason the two boats carried on the north-going sledges were gaily decorated with the royal arms, and the rose, shamrock, and thistle; the artist, as on other occasions, being Doctor Moss, whose great difficulty in the matter was that in spite of the quantity of turpentine used in mixing the paint it would persist in freezing so that the brush became as stiff as a stick every few seconds.