When on August 1 the Roosevelt steamed out from Cape York, she had on board several Eskimo families which we had picked up there and at Salvo Island. We also had about one hundred dogs, bought from the Eskimos. When I say "bought," I do not mean paid for with money, as these people have no money and no unit of value. All exchange between them is based on the principle of pure barter. For instance, if one Eskimo has a deerskin which he does not need, and another has something else, they exchange. The Eskimos had dogs which we wanted, and we had many things which they wanted, such as lumber, knives and other cutlery, cooking utensils, ammunition, matches, et cetera. So, as the Yankees say, we traded.

Steaming in a northwesterly course from Cape York, we passed the "Crimson Cliffs," so named by Sir John Ross, the English explorer, in 1818. This vivid name was applied to the cliffs by reason of the quantities of "red snow" which can be seen from a ship miles out at sea. The color is given to the permanent snow by the Protococcus nivalis, one of the lowest types of the single, living protoplasmic cell. The nearly transparent gelatinous masses vary from a quarter inch in diameter to the size of a pin-head, and they draw from the snow and the air the scanty nourishment which they require. Seen from a distance, the snow looks like blood. This red banner of the Arctic has greeted me on all my northern journeys.

Sailing by these cliffs, which extend for thirty or forty miles, my thoughts were busy with the work before us. First and most necessary of all was the task of gathering our arctic personnel of Eskimos and dogs, already begun before we left Cape York.

Our next stop, after Cape York, was on August 3, at North Star Bay, Oomunnui, as the natives call it, on Wolstenholm Sound. Here I found the Erik, which had become separated from us in Davis Strait several days before during heavy weather. At Oomunnui we took on two or three families of Eskimos and more dogs. Ooqueah, one of my North Pole party, came aboard at this place; Seegloo had joined us at Cape York.

On the night of August 5, a clear and sunshiny night, between Hakluyt and Northumberland Islands I left the Roosevelt and transferred to the Erik, taking Matt Henson with me, for a reconnaissance of the various Eskimo settlements on Inglefield Gulf and along the coast. This detour was for the purpose of picking up more Eskimos and dogs. The Roosevelt was sent ahead to Etah, to get in shape for her coming battle royal with the ice in Kane Basin and the channels beyond.

There was for me a strange mingling of pleasure and sadness in this gathering together of our brown-skinned helpers, for I felt that it was for the last time. The business consumed several days. I went first to Karnah, on the Redcliffe Peninsula, thence to Kangerdlooksoah and Nunatoksoah, near the head of the gulf. Returning on our course, we came back to Karnah, then went south to the neighborhood of the Itiblu Glacier, then northwest again by a devious course around the islands and the points to Kookan, in Robertson Bay, then to Nerke, on C. Saumarez, then on to Etah, where we joined the Roosevelt, having obtained all the Eskimos and dogs we needed,—two hundred and forty-six of the latter, to be exact.

There was no intention of taking to the far North all the Eskimos taken aboard the Erik and the Roosevelt—only the best of them. But if any family wanted transportation from one settlement to another, we were glad to accommodate them. It is to be doubted if anywhere on the waters of the Seven Seas there was ever a more outlandishly picturesque vessel than ours at this time—a sort of free tourist steamship for traveling Eskimos, with their chattering children, barking dogs, and other goods and chattels.

Imagine this man-and-dog-bestrewn ship, on a pleasant, windless summer day in Whale Sound. The listless sea and the overarching sky are a vivid blue in the sunlight—more like a scene in the Bay of Naples than one in the Arctic. There is a crystalline clearness in the pure atmosphere that gives to all colors a brilliancy seen nowhere else—the glittering white of the icebergs with the blue veins running through them; the deep reds, warm grays, and rich browns of the cliffs, streaked here and there with the yellows of the sandstone; a little farther away sometimes the soft green grass of this little arctic oasis; and on the distant horizon the steel-blue of the great inland ice. When the little auks fly high against the sunlit sky, they appear like the leaves of a forest when the early frost has touched them and the first gale of autumn carries them away, circling, drifting, eddying through the air. The desert of northern Africa may be as beautiful as Hichens tells us; the jungles of Asia may wear as vivid coloring; but to my eyes there is nothing so beautiful as the glittering Arctic on a sunlit summer day.

On August 11 the Erik reached Etah, where the Roosevelt was awaiting her. The dogs were landed on an island, the Roosevelt was washed, the boilers were blown down and filled with fresh water, the furnaces cleaned, and the cargo overhauled and re-stowed to put the vessel in fighting trim for her coming encounter with the ice. About three hundred tons of coal were transferred from the Erik to the Roosevelt, and about fifty tons of walrus and whale meat.

Fifty tons of coal were cached at Etah for the Roosevelt's expected return the following year. Two men, boatswain Murphy and Pritchard, the cabin boy, with full provisions for two years, were left in charge. Harry Whitney, a summer passenger on the Erik, who was ambitious to obtain musk-oxen and polar bears, asked permission to remain with my two men at Etah. The permission was granted, and Mr. Whitney's belongings were landed.

At Etah, Rudolph Franke, who had come north with Dr. Cook in 1907, came to me and asked permission to go home on the Erik. He showed me a letter from Dr. Cook directing him to go home this season on a whaler. An examination by Dr. Goodsell, my surgeon, showed that the man suffered from incipient scurvy, and that he was in a serious mental state, so I had no alternative but to give him passage home on the Erik. Boatswain Murphy, whom I was to leave at Etah, was a thoroughly trustworthy man, and I gave him instructions to prevent the Eskimos from looting the supplies and equipment left there by Dr. Cook, and to be prepared to render Dr. Cook any assistance he might require when he returned, as I had no doubt he would as soon as the ice froze over Smith Sound (presumably in January) so as to enable him to cross to Anoratok from Ellesmere Land, where I had no doubt he then was.

On the Erik were three other passengers, Mr. C. C. Crafts, who had come north to take a series of magnetic observations for the department of terrestrial magnetism of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, Mr. George S. Norton, of New York, and Mr. Walter A. Larned, the tennis champion. The Roosevelt's carpenter, Bob Bartlett, of Newfoundland (not related to Captain Bob Bartlett), and a sailor named Johnson also went back on the Erik. That vessel was commanded by Captain Sam Bartlett (Captain Bob's uncle), who had been master of my own ship on several expeditions.

At Etah we took on a few more Eskimos, including Ootah and Egingwah, who were destined to be with me at the Pole; and I left there all the remaining Eskimos that I did not wish to take with me to winter quarters in the North. We retained forty-nine—twenty-two men, seventeen women, ten children—and two hundred and forty-six dogs. The Roosevelt, as usual, was loaded almost to the water's edge with the coal that had been crowded into her, the seventy tons of whale meat which we had bought in Labrador, and the meat and blubber of nearly fifty walruses.

We parted company from the Erik and steamed north on the 18th of August, an intensely disagreeable day, with driving snow and rain, and a cutting wind from the southeast which made the sea very rough. As the two ships separated, they signaled "good-by and good luck" with the whistles, and our last link with civilization was broken.

Since my return I have been asked if I did not feel deep emotion on parting with my companions on the Erik, and I have truthfully replied that I did not. The reader must remember that this was my eighth expedition into the Arctic, and that I had parted from a supply ship many times before. Constant repetition will take the edge from the most dramatic experience. As we steamed north from the harbor of Etah, my thoughts were on the condition of the ice in Robeson Channel; and the ice in Robeson Channel is more dramatic than any parting—save from one's nearest and dearest, and I had left mine three thousand miles below at Sydney. We had some three hundred and fifty miles of almost solid ice to negotiate before we could reach our hoped-for winter quarters at Cape Sheridan. I knew that beyond Smith Sound we might have to make our slow way rod by rod, and sometimes literally inch by inch, butting and ramming and dodging the mountainous ice; that, if the Roosevelt survived, I should probably not have my clothes off, or be able to snatch more than an hour or two of sleep at a time, for two or three weeks. Should we lose our ship and have to make our way over the ice southward from anywhere below Lady Franklin Bay, or possibly beyond there—it was good-by to my life's dream and probably to some of my companions.