Finally on this day, the doctor discharged Chipp from the sicklist, though doubtful as to how long it might be before Chipp broke down again. This resulted in a shuffle in commands—Chipp relieved me in charge of the working force; I relieved Ambler in charge of the road gang; and Ambler with only Danenhower left as a regular patient, was detailed to work with Dunbar in scouting out the road. The doctor offered to join the sledge gang in harness, but we were doing better there, so the skipper refused. He preferred to use Ambler simply as scout and medical officer, hoping that his terribly calloused, corned, and chapped hands might recover enough for proper surgical work should an accident make any necessary.
The skipper worked out some sights. The latitude, reliable, was 76° 41′ N.—28 miles gained to the south in six days—fine progress, much more than we were logging over the ice. The longitude, doubtful, put us at 153° 30′ E., indicating we were still going southeast though we were heading southwest, but we were not greatly concerned over that. Anything to the south was cause for gratitude.
We dragged along five days more. Newcomb at last shot something, a gull he called a mollemokki, interesting ornithologically to him, perhaps, worthless to us for food, certainly. The ice grew rotten; we had more trouble with it. Our men, their eyes and minds affected by the ice, easily deluded by mirages, were now seeing land in nearly all directions, south of us, west of us, and even north of us! And not a day went by when someone didn’t see open water ahead of us, fine wide-open sea in which we could launch our boats, toss away our sledges, and sail homeward in comfort!
Instead of that we soon bumped into the worst mess of ice we had yet encountered, a jumble of small lumps and water, with numberless large floes tipped on end vertically. With my road gang and our solitary pick-ax, I started the herculean job of clearing away some of these hummocks so we might proceed, and was busily at it when the doctor, bless his soul, came in to report that by retracing our path northward half a mile, we could then go due west till we got on the flank of that broken ice, after which we might go southwest again. I snapped at that; the job ahead of me was like tunneling through a mountain with a toothpick. So back over our trail we went with our boats and sledges.
Getting across even that better path was a heartrending job, for the rotten floes would hardly stick alongside each other, till finally using all the lines we had, like Alpine climbers we lashed the floes together while we crossed over, seriously hampered by a dense fog. It was a long stretch. In the middle of it, we came to morning, our usual time for piping down to camp and rest during the day, but the captain, seriously alarmed at the prospect of that rotten and moving ice disintegrating under us while we slept, belayed the usual camp. So without rest and only a brief stop for supper, we kept on, till after twenty-three hours of terrific labor we came in the late afternoon to a solider floe and stopped at last to rest our weary bones.
The captain, feeling rightly enough that what we now most sorely needed was sleep rather than cold supper, gave the order for all hands to turn in. This the men in my tent thankfully did and were soon stretched out in their sleeping bags, but in the next tent, assigned to Danenhower, Newcomb, and five seamen, Newcomb immediately sounded off.
“This is a fine way,” he said sarcastically, “to treat men who have been working so hard; ordering them to turn in without anything to eat!”
Lieutenant Danenhower peered in surprise through his dark glasses at the naturalist who had done nothing all day but carry a small shotgun.
“Maybe it is hard for the men who are working, Newcomb,” he said quietly, “but for you and me who haven’t done a blessed thing, it isn’t, and we shouldn’t be the first to complain now.”
Newcomb ran true to form. Instead of taking the hint thus delicately conveyed, he retorted angrily,