Marching onward, Pim's next trouble was with a food-cache, laid down by himself the previous autumn, which wild animals—probably bears and wolves—had plundered in large part, though some of the thick metal coverings of the solidly frozen meats had escaped with rough marks of the teeth and claws.
Pim took everything with jovial humor, and was entirely happy when he left the firm land of Melville Island to cross frozen Banks Strait to Mercy Bay, Banks Land. Bad as was travel along the ice-foot bordering the land, it was far worse in the strait. Domville officially reported that their course "was beset with every difficulty, every variety of hummocks and deep snow barring our progress in all directions. Some of the ridges, too irregular for a loaded sledge, required portages to be made, a mode of proceeding almost equally difficult and dangerous to the limbs, from the men sinking to the middle through the soft snow amongst the masses of forced-up hummocks."
Later there came some level stretches, and then Pim hoisted a sail on the man-sledge to help it along. It nearly proved their ruin, for the sledge took charge on a steep, glassy hummock, knocked over the men, plunged into a deep crevasse, and broke a runner. Pim did not hesitate an hour over the best thing to do. Leaving Domville to patch up the sledge and to return and await him at the last depot, Pim started ahead with his six dogs and two men toward Mercy Bay. Sleepless nights of fearful cold, days of weary toil with sun-dazzled eyes, biting blasts of sharp blizzards, exhausting struggles through rubble ice—these one and all could neither quench the spirit nor bend the will of this forceful man. Ever faithful to the motto of his sledge flag, "Hope on: hope ever," he ceased not until the land was reached and success insured.
Skirting the ice-foot of the northeastern coast of Banks Land, his heart came into his mouth as, rounding a cape, he saw the dark spars of an ice-beset ship loom up against the sullen southern sky. Blistered and brazened, half snow-blinded, with face covered with accumulations of greasy soot, what wonder that this fur-clad figure was thought by the amazed M'Clure to be an Eskimo, a mistake aided by the wild gesticulations and loud, unintelligible shouts of a man whose face was as black as ebony.
Of Pim's coming Dr. Armstrong of the Investigator says: "No words could express the feelings of heart-felt gladness which all experienced at this unlooked-for, this most providential arrival."
Over the rough, winding trails of the arctic highway, Pim had travelled four hundred and twenty-seven miles from ship to ship, and made a journey that will ever live in polar annals as fraught with vital interests beyond those of any other single sledge trip.
Of Pim's work a fellow-officer, McDougal, wrote: "Each member of our little community must have felt his heart glow to reflect that he formed one of the little band whose undertakings in the cause of humanity had been crowned with such success."
Thus it happened that through the heroic energy and persistent efforts of Bedford Pim, the outcome of the voyage of the Investigator[7] was changed from that of certain disaster to one of astounding success. Save for this timely sledge journey, many of his sailor comrades must have found unknown graves among the ice-crowned isles of the northern seas, and an awful tragedy would have marked the splendid annals of the Franklin search.