December 21 was the Arctic midnight, the day of days in the Arctic, the day that we all looked forward to, for now the sun was coming towards us every day, and every day the daylight would lengthen. We were not, of course, getting real daylight but at midday we got a kind of twilight that was good enough to get about by, out of doors. Mr. Hadley and I experimented with the acetylene lights but found that outside of the ship they would not work because the water froze.

On the twenty-second much of the twilight time was used in clearing away the huge banks of snow that had drifted about the ship. The chess tournament was decided on that day. The men had been playing it for a good while and now the winner of the most games received the first prize, a box of fifty cigars, and the next man the second prize, a box of twenty-five cigars. Mamen took the first prize and the mate, Mr. Anderson, the second.

The dogs, which we had been keeping all together in the box-house, broke their chains on the twenty-third, and some of them got into a fight; our best dog, Jack, was so badly bitten that he could not walk. I took him on board and down into the carpenter’s shop where Mr. Hadley sewed up his wounds with surgical needle and silk cord. Poor Jack was in bad shape and at first refused all food. He received constant attention from Mr. Hadley but could not bear a harness until the latter part of February. The fight in which he was hurt warned us that we must not keep too many dogs together, so I had the Eskimo build several snow kennels in a large snow-bank near the ship. They sprinkled ashes on the floor of the kennels and chained up the nine most quarrelsome dogs, each in his separate kennel.

With the approach of Christmas all hands began to make plans for the proper celebration of that good old holiday. The spirits of the whole party were excellent; now that they were in the neighborhood of the place where Santa Claus came from they seemed determined to observe the day in a manner worthy of the jolly old saint.

At six o’clock on Christmas morning the second engineer and McKinlay started in decorating the cabin with the flags of the International Code and a fine lot of colored ribbon which Mr. Hadley had brought with him from Point Barrow for the trading he had hoped to do in Banks Land. Later in the morning I went around and distributed presents to the Eskimo. I gave each of the Eskimo men a hunting-knife and a watch and the Eskimo woman a cotton dress, stockings and underwear, talcum powder, soap, a looking-glass, a comb and brush and some ribbon, with a cotton dress for each of the little girls.

At eleven o’clock the first event on our typewritten programme began—the sports. This was the list:

D. G. S. Karluk. Xmas Day, 1913

The events of the sports programme arranged for the day will take place in the following order:

Interval for refreshments