Back in No. 5 engine room Andy found the motor crew battling a stubborn piece of machinery. The motor would turn over all right but they couldn’t get the necessary speed. Andy slipped into a pair of coveralls and worked with the crew. The trouble was in the timing and it took them two hours to do the job.
When Andy returned to the main gondola, the sky was light in the east for they were getting into a latitude where the summer nights were short and the days extremely long. Andy stepped into the control room and Serge pointed ahead of them to a blue expanse of water.
“Hudson Strait,” he cried and Andy, hardly believing the words, looked at the chart. An hour later they were cutting across a corner of Fox Land. Then the Goliath was over Baffin Land with the waters of Baffin Bay ahead and to their right.
At five a.m. Andy, who had slept for two hours, relieved Serge. A sharp wind had come out of the north and the Goliath’s speed was down to seventy miles an hour.
The broad expanse of Baffin Bay was dotted with ice. They nosed out over Home Bay with the open area of the South water beneath them. Ahead was the great area of everlasting ice known as the Middle ice. For three hours the Goliath fought its way over the ice sheet. Then came the 25 mile stretch of open water known as Middle water and then another sheet of desolate ice. It was noon when the Goliath finally left the Middle ice and looked down on the berg-dotted stretch of North water. To their right was that majestic land of eternal ice—Greenland, while to their left was the desolate reaches of Ellesmere island.
Serge took over the controls but Andy, instead of going back to rest, remained at the window, looking down at the ever-changing panorama.
Bert had managed to pick up the wireless station at Etah and had asked for a weather report.
“Clear but a thirty mile wind from the north,” Etah had replied, when the operator had recovered from his astonishment at learning of the proximity of the Goliath.
With their speed greatly curtailed by the strong wind and a desire to economize as much as possible on fuel, it was late in the day when the Goliath stuck its nose into Smith Sound and looked down at Etah, the farthest north year-round settlement of Greenland.
The Goliath dropped low over Etah in salute to its residents. Then the motors of the Goliath echoed their power through the stillness of the Arctic, Andy brought the nose up, and they proceeded up Smith’s Sound and into Kane Basin.