After the long winter of sunless days and bitter cold, it was with high hopes and cheery hearts that the long line of dog-drawn sledges followed Mylius-Erichsen as they wended their way northward at the end of March, 1907. With ten sledges and nearly a hundred dogs much was to be done by the resolute men who feared neither cold nor famine, the dangers of the sea-ice, or the hardships of the trail.
Amdrup and Hazen Lands, Greenland.
Their courage and strength were soon tested by difficulties and perils of unexpected character, for they thought to find the ordinary ice-foot along the shore, which could be followed inward or outward as the character of the ice dictated. But there was no ice-foot. Along Glacier Gulf for the distance of one hundred and forty miles the glacial ice-cap of Greenland, known usually as the inland ice, moves summer and winter—with unbroken vertical front, hundreds of feet in height—slowly but unceasingly into the Greenland Sea. Between the steady southward drift of the vast ice-fields from the Arctic Ocean and the seaward march of the glacier the shore ice was found to be of almost incredible roughness. Magnificent, and unequalled elsewhere in the world, was the sight of this towering sea-face, but scores upon scores of miles of ever-dominating ice-cliffs through their weeks of struggle grew to be unwelcome, so that their end at Lambert Land was hailed with joy.
Here came unexpected food, which did much to make the completion of the survey possible. As they were crossing the smooth fiord ice, Brönlund's keen and practised eye saw far shoreward tiny specks of moving animals, and he shouted loudly "Nanetok!" (A bear!). They proved to be two mother bears with cubs. In a trice the teams were stopped, the trace-toggles slipped from the few dogs that were used to bear-hunting, who started excitedly on the jump for the already fleeing game. Soon catching up with the lumbering animals, slow-moving on account of the cubs, the dogs, followed their usual tactics of nipping sharply the hind legs of the bear, who stops to drive off the dog or stumbles forward with the dog fast at his legs. Meantime Brönlund and Tobias, the two Eskimo dog drivers, quickly threw off the sledge loads on the floe and drove on with such speed that the hunters were soon within shot. The bears skinned and the dogs fed, the northward march was renewed in high spirits, for the slow travel had sadly reduced their food.
They were nearly in despair on reaching the south shore of Mount Mallemuk, as the open sea made it impossible to pass around it. With exhausting labor they finally were able to clamber up a projecting point of the seaward-flowing glacier, but their first supporting sledge here turned homeward.
Difficult as had been the ice and the glacier-scaling, they came to a real danger when around Mallemuk they were driven far out on the ocean in order to proceed northward, for the inland ice was impossible of passage and great areas of open water gave way slowly seaward to new ice. This was so thin that it bent and crackled as sledge after sledge tried in separate and fearsome order a passage that threatened to engulf them at any moment. Yet they came safely to Amdrup Land, 80° 43′ N., whence the last supporting party returned, charged to explore on their homeward journey the unknown fiords to the north of Lambert Land, where their spring discoveries of new lands had begun.