Dr. Rasmussen, for instance, has crossed it about forty times. Probably he has travelled up here more than any other living man. He told me that once it took six weeks to get just across Melville Bay, his boat being frozen in solid in the pack ice, and just drifting. How lucky we have been to get across three times with practically no ice at all.
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CHAPTER IX
OUR FIRST NARWHAL
After crossing Melville Bay again for the third time, and without stopping at Cape York, we arrived in Thule. Coming up, on the other side of Melville Bay, I got entirely cheated out of one stop. It was very early morning and I was sound asleep and they didn’t wake me.
As the boats came out to meet the Morrissey the men waved their hats in greeting. But when they came near and saw that Rasmussen was aboard they started shouting and cheering. The man running the engine in the little power boat was so excited that he forgot to stop the motor and ran the boat full speed and head on into the side of the vessel [[101]]so hard that most of the people in his craft fell down.
We brought Rasmussen to this trading station of his where he had not been for five years and Dad had agreed to take away for him to New York the fox skins they had traded from the Eskimos during the winter. Also Mr. Rasmussen’s manager, who is also his cousin, had been promised that he could go back to Denmark this year. He had been at Thule continuously for six years. The first time we were there an apple Dad gave him was the first he had eaten in all that time.