“Belay that, Dunbar, you wouldn’t be so heartless,” piped up Danenhower. “Don’t destroy my last boyhood illusion. What would life in the Arctic be without our dogs, anyway?”
“Still hell, Dan, if you ask me, either with or without ’em,” replied the ice-pilot grimly, passing his plate to me for oatmeal. “But getting back to the question of exercise, cap’n, I think letting the men hunt’s a fine idea. Surprising how far a man goes thinking that at the next waterhole he’ll surely get a seal!”
The surgeon laughed softly.
“He’ll be surprised all right if he goes with you, Dunbar,” drawled Ambler. “I’ve done it and I know. Every time you say a thing’s a mile away across this ice, the only reason it isn’t two miles off is because it’s three. The men’ll be surprised all right if you take them hunting.”
Virginian and Yankee, the doctor and the ice-pilot were off again on their favorite argument, Dunbar’s gross underestimation of the distances he covered on his many scouting trips over the ice. But I had another problem on my mind, and as soon as I had washed down my oatmeal with the hot coffee (which by now Danenhower had managed to get Ah Sam to turn out as a strong black concoction) I went on deck to struggle with my distilling apparatus.
Historically, there is no doubt that scurvy, the seaman’s curse since the days of Noah’s voyage in the Ark, has always resulted on long cruises from the absence of fresh vegetables, the over-abundance of salt beef, and the impure water (contaminated from the bilges) which marked the sailor’s diet. And no one who has ever seen the swollen joints, the rotting teeth, the hemorrhages under the skin, and the bloated faces of the victims, but strains to fight shy of scurvy as a shipmate.
Fresh vegetables, the first defense against this scourge, we could only carry in limited degree when we left San Francisco, and they had long since been exhausted. Of canned vegetables, especially tomatoes, we had a considerable supply and on these we leaned heavily as an antidote. Then of course we had three barrels of lime-juice, the specific remedy introduced in 1795 by Sir Gilbert Blake with such good results in the British Navy that ever since then the British tars, forced to drink the stuff regularly, have been called in derision “limeys” by their Yankee cousins. But in spite of all this we did not feel safe. Other Arctic expeditions within the last fifty years, as strongly fortified as we with lime-juice and in some cases as well supplied with canned vegetables, had before the end of a winter in the ice found scurvy decimating them in spite of their precautions.
We were fitted out with copies of every printed record of polar exploration that either in the United States or in Europe, Bennett or his satellites on the New York Herald could lay hands on. And De Long, a good student if the Navy ever produced one, spent hours in his cabin poring over the accounts of his contemporaries and his predecessors in the ice puzzling out that riddle. Why in spite of lime-juice and canned vegetables, in spite of pure fresh water daily replenished from melting ice, had even our immediate rivals in the race to the Pole still fallen prey to scurvy?
Their books gave no answer, but our experiences in getting water by melting ice from the floebergs round us soon gave us a clue. We had been led to believe that when sea water froze under very low temperatures, the salt in it crystallized out, rose to the freezing surface as an efflorescence, and was washed or blown away, leaving the ice free of salt and fit to be melted into good drinking water. Indeed Dr. Kane, whose words at that time were accepted as gospel truth on all matters Arctic, had written,
“Ice formed at a temperature of -30° Fahrenheit will yield a perfectly pure and potable element.”