November 10 was an unusually beautiful day. There was a fresh south wind and the temperature went up to twenty-three degrees above zero; it was almost like a spring day. About three miles from the ship the Eskimo shot six seal. They also got the first bear of our drift, a young one three or four years old, about six feet long, with a good coat. They had been on the lookout for bear, on account of the amount of seal meat they had left on the ice. I intended to give the skin of this bear to the Boston City Club for its new club-house but we needed it and had to use it for trousers and mittens. Everybody was still wearing American clothes at this time, with deerskin boots.
We had the deck covered with snow about two feet deep to make the ship warm; when the top of the snow became dirty we took off a few inches and replaced it with clean snow. The outside of the ship was banked up and we built a kind of runway from the deck to the ice with walls made of blocks of snow. This made our passage between the ship and the ice easy.
November 11 the sun left us for good; we were now to be without it throughout the twenty-four hours for seventy-one days.
The young Eskimo widower, Kataktovick, came to me the next day and asked me for a fountain pen, to write letters to his Eskimo friends, I presume. Some weeks before he had asked me for a book to read; after a fortnight he brought it back, said that he had read it and asked for some magazines. We had a good many and the pictures were interesting so I let him have them gladly. On this particular day he came into my cabin and saw me writing with a fountain pen. Kataktovick did not ask outright for the pen but simply said that he wanted something to write with. I offered him a pencil but he shook his head and said that was not what he wanted. Then I asked him if the pen was what he wanted. He said it was. I gave him one, as we had a large quantity of fountain pens, and as I gave it to him I thought to myself: “What would Peary say?” To live in the open as they have been accustomed to live is in his judgment the Eskimo’s normal existence and not to become dependent on the white man’s methods of life. We had a large supply of blank-books on board, in which our scientists jotted down notes and calculations to be afterwards transcribed on the typewriter, and I gave Kataktovick some of these blank-books from time to time.
The next day we had another wonderful display of the aurora, with brilliant moonlight, which had been lighting up the scene for several days. For a while in the afternoon, as we drifted steadily along, we saw a little of the sun’s upper limb. Our latitude was too far north for us to see the real sun at this time of year; it was the distorted sun that we saw, like the mirage which one sees in a desert.
I remember that when I was a boy in the Methodist Academy in Brigus, the town where I was born in Newfoundland, the Anglo-American Telegraph superintendent at St. John’s once told us that when he was a young man at Cape Race a certain ship from Europe was expected at a given time but failed to appear. Finally they apparently saw her heading in towards shore, and they launched a boat and went out to meet her. When they reached the spot where she was supposed to be she was not there and did not turn up until some ten hours later. Her apparent presence was simply a peculiarity of the sea-horizon, a refraction or distortion.
The Eskimo reported fox tracks a few miles from the ship and I gave them a dozen fox traps. The Arctic fox is of a clear white color, his pelt often whiter than that of the polar bear, which sometimes verges on the yellow. The Eskimo set the traps at various points on the ice, fastened securely so that the foxes would not carry them away, and on the seventeenth they caught one very small fox. Mr. Hadley finished the second Peary sledge. We lost the dredge again on the seventeenth and had to replace it with another one, which brought up some more specimens new to Murray. The temperature was only nine below zero but it was as cold as it is along the Atlantic seaboard in winter because just now there was much open water about us, though it was a good many miles away. On our North Pole trips we had much lower temperatures than we were now having but felt the cold less because it remained at the same level for weeks and was free from dampness because there were not so many open leads.
On the nineteenth we lost the lead and tube of the Kelvin sounding-machine; the wire kinked and broke, so we had to attach another lead and brass tube. It was a typical Cape Sheridan day, a magnificent morning with hardly any wind and a temperature of nineteen below zero.
Soot had accumulated in the funnel of my cabin stove, so that the fire would not burn, and I determined on the twentieth to adopt heroic measures to get the soot out. The method which I finally hit upon was effective but disturbing. I decided to pour a lot of flashlight powder in the stove, as this would give a quick puff and blow out the soot. I was pouring the powder in, when I inadvertently poured too fast and got too much in. Flash! The door of the stove came off and sailed past my head; if it had hit me it would have killed me. As it was the stove lost its bearings and landed with a tremendous crash against the side of the room, but no particular damage was done—except to the soot.
Murray got a little octopus in the dredge. He had been getting stones, small pebbles at first and then larger ones, almost perfectly round and very smooth. Now, however, he began to get specimens of previously unknown animal life again—eleven different kinds in one day. He was faithful and untiring in his dredging and his work, at which we all helped, was not the kind that had the apparent zest of hunting or exploration in it, but called for patient investigation and, always, hard labor. It was a great pity that we were unable to save the things his dredging brought up.