I stood a moment in the cold air (the temperature had dropped to 10° F.) with bared head, a silent mourner but thankful that we had not gone with her, then crawled sadly back to my sleeping bag.
On the sixth day after the crushing of the ship, our goods were sorted, our sledges all packed, and we were ready to go southward. Eight sledges, heavily loaded with our three boats and our provisions, carried about a ton each; a ninth sledge, more lightly loaded carrying our lime-juice, our whiskey, and our medical stores, was considered the hospital sledge; while a tenth, carrying only a small dinghy for temporary work in ferrying over leads, completed our cavalcade.
To minimize the glare of the ice and the strain of working under a brilliant (but not a hot sun) all our traveling was to be done at night when the midnight sun was low in the heavens, with our camping and sleeping during the day when the sun being higher, his more direct rays might be better counted on to dry out our soaked clothing.
At 6 P.M. on June 17th, we started, course due south.
Our first day’s journey was a heart-wrenching nightmare which no man there was like to forget till his dying gasp. The dogs were unable to drag even their one sledge; it took six men in addition to keep it moving. And so bad was the snow through which the sledges sank and floundered, that we found it took our entire force heaving together against their canvas harnesses to advance the boats and their sledges one at a time against the snow banking up under the bows of the clumsy boats.
Dunbar had gone ahead, planting four black flags at intervals to mark the path which he as pilot had selected for us to follow, the fourth and last flag, only a mile and a half along from the start, being the end of our first night’s journey. But so terrible was the going that by morning only one boat, the first cutter, had reached that last flag; the runners had collapsed under three of the sledges, stalling them; a wide lead had unexpectedly opened up in a floe halfway down our road, blocking the other sledges and requiring them to be unloaded and ferried over it; Chipp (who, with Alexey and Kuehne, in spite of being the sick were dragging the hospital sledge) had fainted dead away in the snow; Lauterbach and Lee had both collapsed in their harnesses, Lauterbach with cramps in his stomach, Lee with cramps in his legs; and by 6 A.M., when our night’s journey should have been finished and all hands at the last flag pitching camp, we had instead broken down and blocked sledges scattered over that mile and a half of pack ice from one end to the other!
It was sickening. Twelve hours of man-killing effort and we had made good over the ice not even one and a half miles!
Willy-nilly, we made camp, breakfasted, and turned in at 8 A.M., for our exhausted men could do no more without a rest. But for Surgeon Ambler, there was no rest. While the remainder of us, dead to the world, slumbered that day, Ambler, who as much as anyone the night before had toiled with the sledges along that heartbreaking road, labored over the sick, struggling to get them on their feet again for what faced them that evening.
That night we turned to once more, repairing runners, shifting loads, digging sledges out of snowbanks in which they were buried, and fighting desperately to advance all to the first camp. Regardless of a temperature of 20° F., we perspired as if in the tropics, and tossing aside our parkas, worked in our undershirts in the snow. All that night and the next night also, we labored thus. By the second morning following, thank God, we had all our boats and sledges together there, and tumbled again into our sleeping bags, wearied mortals if ever there were such on this earth! Three nights of hell to make a mile and a half of progress! It was worse even than my journey to Henrietta Island had led me to believe could be possible.
And then that day, of all things in the Arctic, it started to rain! Miserable completely, we sat or lay in our leaking tents, soaked, muscle-weary, and frozen, while the cold rain trickled over us and over the icy floors of our tents. But while I had thought no creatures could possibly be suffering greater misery than we, I changed my mind when I saw our dogs, cowering in the rain, snuggle against our tent doors, begging to be admitted to such poor shelter as we had. So soon, with men and beasts shivering all together, the picture of our misery was completed.