The personal bags contained four extra pairs of kamiks, with fur stockings, a woolen shirt, three pairs of sealskin mittens, two pairs of fur mittens, a piece of blanket, a sealskin coat (netsha), extra fox tails and dog harness, a repair kit for mending clothing, and much other necessary material.
On the march we wore snow goggles, blue fox coats (kapitahs) and birdskin shirts (Ah-tea), bearskin pants (Nan-nooka), sealskin boots (Kam-ik), hare-skin stockings (Ah-tee-shah), and a band of fox tails under the knee and about the waist.
The food supply, as will be seen by the following list, was mostly pemmican:
Eight hundred and five pounds of beef pemmican, one hundred and thirty pounds of walrus pemmican, fifty pounds of musk ox tenderloin, twenty-five pounds of musk ox tallow, two pounds of tea, one pound of coffee, twenty-five pounds of sugar, forty pounds of condensed milk, sixty pounds of milk biscuit, ten pounds of pea soup powdered and compressed, fifty pounds of surprises, forty pounds petroleum, two pounds of wood alcohol, three pounds of candles and one pound of matches.
We planned our future food supply with pemmican as practically the sole food; the other things were to be mere palate satisfiers. For the eighty days the supply was to be distributed as follows:
For three men: Pemmican, one pound per day for eighty days, two hundred and forty pounds. For six dogs: Pemmican, one pound per day for eighty days, four hundred and eighty pounds. This necessitated a total of seven hundred and twenty pounds of pemmican.
Of the twenty-six dogs, we had at first figured on taking sixteen over the entire trip to the Pole and back to our caches on land, but in this last calculation only six were to be taken. Twenty, the least useful, were to be used one after the other, as food on the march, as soon as reduced loads and better ice permitted. This, we counted, would give one thousand pounds of fresh meat over and above our pemmican supply. We carried about two hundred pounds of pemmican above the expected consumption, and in the final working out the dogs were used for traction purposes longer than we anticipated. But, with a cautious saving, the problem was solved somewhat more economically than any figuring before the start indicated.
Every possible article of equipment was made to do double service; not an ounce of dead weight was carried which could be dispensed with.
After making several trips about Svartevoeg, arranging caches for the return, studying the ice and land, I decided to make the final start on the Polar sea on March 18, 1908.
The time had come to part with most of our faithful Eskimo companions. Taking their hands in my manner of parting, I thanked them as well as I could for their faithful service to me. "Tigishi ah yaung-uluk!" (The big nail!), they replied, wishing me luck.