On the twenty-second my thoughts turned towards Boston and Cambridge, for I knew that this was the day of the Harvard-Yale football game, which I had attended so many times. I wondered who would win and as the afternoon wore on I thought of what must be taking place on Soldiers’ Field and of the life and activity in the hotels of Boston the night after the game.
I looked back and remembered some of the things that had happened when I had seen games in the past and wondered when I should see another. I recalled how I went down to New Haven the day before the game in 1910 and went into the country to the Yale headquarters and talked to the team on our North Pole trip of the previous year to take their minds off their troubles. And I remembered, too, how George Borup took the news of the 1908 game when we got our mail for the first time in over a year on our way home in the Roosevelt from the North Pole trip in the late summer of 1909. He and MacMillan occupied the same cabin and were eagerly looking over their letters when suddenly Borup began to cry out in tones of anguish, “Oh, dear! Oh, isn’t that terrible! Oh, I can’t believe it’s true!” until MacMillan was sure that he had learned of the death of some near relative. Finally when he felt that he must ask he ventured to inquire the cause of Borup’s mourning and to hope that he had not heard bad news. “Why, just think!” replied Borup. “Harvard beat Yale last fall, 4 to 0!” Now, on November 22, 1913, when the sky cleared to the south and we were treated to a red glow in that direction to light up the darkness I wondered if anything happening in the vicinity of Cambridge was having its effect on the meteorological conditions.
We had reached nearly to Lat. 73 N. on November 15. This proved to be our farthest north. After that for a month the winds drove us south and southwest and then for the rest of our drift more nearly due west again. We now had a little relief from the incessant sixty-mile gale which had been making it intensely cold for a number of days and on the twenty-fourth the red glow continuing gave us the effect of a little twilight which enabled Malloch to read the transit in his observatory without the aid of a lantern. The temperature was twenty below zero, but the air was so clear and clean that one could go about out of doors with American clothes on without discomfort. Just before midnight, however, the thermometer began to climb and the barometer to drop, denoting the approach of a storm, and all day long on the twenty-fifth it was a miserable time to be out. We had our work to do, however, and the Eskimo finished banking up the starboard side of the ship with snow to make things as warm and comfortable as possible.
November 27 was Thanksgiving Day in the States but as we were a Canadian expedition we made no observance of the day. My thoughts took another backward glance to the Thanksgiving Days I had spent in Belmont and Winchester and elsewhere, with my good friends of Boston.
The day began early with me because I was awakened from a sound sleep, almost choking to death from the sulphurous fumes of the mess-room stove which I found on getting out of my cabin was smoking badly. Chafe, the mess-room steward, was making heroic efforts to get the fire going to take the fumes off. I told him to take hold of the stove with me and carry it out on deck, which we managed to do.
CHAPTER X
THE ARCTIC NIGHT
The first few days of December were cold and stormy, with very high winds. I made up my mind that we were in the place where all the bad weather was manufactured, to be passed along to Medicine Hat and thence distributed to Chicago and Boston and points south. We got a little twilight from ten to two on pleasant days, so that the men could see to work out of doors. The health of the party throughout our drift was excellent. Every one had plenty of vigorous, outdoor exercise and slept soundly, though the incessant howling of the wind was not always conducive to a feeling of carefree contentment.
There was considerable pressure early in the month at a point about a mile from the ship, which tossed the ice into rafters, but we did not feel it on board. On the tenth a ribbon of water about a foot wide showed in the ice about two hundred yards from the ship, opening and closing off and on for several days. The temperature was getting pretty cold now, down in the minus thirties, yet the air was clear much of the time and we were not uncomfortable out of doors, even in American clothes. Mr. Hadley finished the third Peary sledge on the eleventh. On the same day I had the Eskimo build a large snow igloo on the floe where we had our box-house of supplies, to furnish additional shelter for ourselves and the dogs. We began making wooden boxes for the protection of our Primus stoves in case we had to take to the ice. The Primus stove is an ingenious device for heating tea or whatever else you have that needs heating; it uses kerosene oil, ignited by means of alcohol, works somewhat like a plumber’s torch and has long been used by men engaged in Arctic work. It is not so efficient as the special alcohol stove invented by Peary for his expeditions but as a general rule it does good work. On our trip to Wrangell Island, we used gasoline in these stoves, although warned by the directions in big red letters not to do so. In spite of the directions the gasoline worked well and did not need to be ignited by alcohol.
On the sixteenth I had the Eskimo dig out the seal meat which we had kept in the “ice-houses” near the ship and put it on deck, so that we could have it handy in case the ice broke up around the ship. Furthermore, I wanted to see how much we had accumulated. I found that we had forty-one seal, about 1600 pounds, enough to last twenty-five people sixty-seven days. Not every one on board liked seal meat but all could eat it. I had Mamen at work these days making up a list of things required in case I went on another Arctic drift some time. Murray lost his dredge again on the eighteenth when it caught on the ice and parted the line; the chief engineer started work at once on another.