AT POND’S INLET
On August twenty-eighth after a long time in very thick fog we at last saw land only a little way off. For a couple of days we had been working down the coast of Devon Island and Bylot Island, wanting to get to Pond’s Inlet where there is a station of the Northwest Mounted Police and also a post of the Hudson Bay Company.
Cap’n Bob had not been able to see land or to take any observations but we knew pretty well from dead reckoning that we had reached the south shore of Pond’s Inlet. “Dead reckoning,” you know, means finding out where you are by the record of the number of miles the log shows the ship has [[144]]travelled. The log itself is a little instrument like a small propeller which is let out on a long rope at the stern; it turns around fast or slow according to the speed at which the boat travels, and the revolutions it makes are recorded showing the number of knots, or sea miles, covered.
While we were drifting around in the fog, barely in sight of the high land which now and then showed through the fog, Dad and Dr. Rasmussen paddled about a bit in a small boat shooting murres and dovekies. In quite a short time Dad shot fifty-one, which made several meals for the crowd.
Then later we put the dory over with the Johnson engine in it. It made a good little boat to go ahead and see how deep the water was. One of the sailors was in her using the lead and calling back to the Morrissey the depths of water he found.
After a few miles of groping along that way we stopped near shore where a little stream [[145]]came down right beside a glacier. We only had a few gallons of water left on board in the big tank, and nearly all the casks were empty. While the crew took the casks ashore and filled them, Bob Peary, Ed Manley and I went out rowing in the fog looking for seal. We’d seen quite a few during the day. Of course we didn’t get out of sight of land, but kept going down along the shore, so we could find our way back. You really could see only about a hundred yards.
We shot at a couple of seal but missed them. They are pretty hard to hit in the water. They come up just for a minute or even a few seconds and take a look at you if you are close and then dive. We were just going after another which seemed to be keeping pretty well on the surface when we heard the fog horn on the Morrissey. That was a signal that we should come back.
A little later we went ashore and on a rocky hillside found a whaler’s grave. He [[146]]was a harpooner on a famous whaler, the Diana, of Dundee, Scotland, and was buried there in 1903. Some other whalers’ graves not far away were a hundred years old, for there were many of them up here as early as that. During some seasons, I was told, as many as a couple of thousand men would be in these waters and some vessels wintered in little harbors along the coast. Now the whales are about all gone and the whalers are out of business.
The fog cleared up later in the day and we made our way to Albert Harbor which was one of the old whaler’s headquarters. There are high cliffs on all sides so it is wonderfully well protected and the water is very deep. In the old days they used to bring the vessels right up to the rock slides at the foot of the cliffs and put ballast on.
Then we went on further up the Inlet, which really is a broad sound mostly a dozen miles wide to the place where the Hudson [[147]]Bay Company’s post is. Right next to the Post is the detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The Police have a barracks and a store house, and the H. B. C. about the same, with a store too. Then down along the beach are a dozen little shacks and some sod houses, the homes of the natives who live there. But most of the Eskimos in that part of the country live far away from the post, in villages out where the hunting is better.