We all laughed heartily at the incident and settled down to routine-life on ship-board. Our last farewell from the great port of the Metropolis was from the Detention Ward on Ellis Island. The Pesthouse band was out in full-force and blew germs into the air with much enthusiasm, but Triplett had laid a course to windward so that we felt no apprehension.
It is perhaps not amiss at this point to say something regarding the highly important part played in our expedition by the Kawa herself. She may be said, I think, to be the star of a distinguished cast, or more accurately, that she divided stellar honors with me. For one of the conditions which was part of my bargain with good old Waxman and his associates was that I should actually take my ship to the Pole!
The expression on the faces of the worthy committee of the E.U. when I accepted this astounding condition is something that I must leave to the reader's imagination.
"Yes, gentlemen," I had said to them. "It can be done, and it will be done. Either I hitch the Kawa to the Pole or I never return!"
My announcement was greeted with cheers.
Immediately upon my return from Boston I closeted myself with Captain Triplett in the cozy nautical room of the Book-lovers Library and we jointly went over the layout of the Kawa from stem to stern. We were surrounded by files of drawings and a great mass of data upon naval architecture with special reference to Arctic conditions. From the outset I was imbued with a conviction that we should find nothing of real importance in what had been done before. A careful study of my predecessors convinced me that they had uniformly been on the wrong track. What they had tried to do was to fight the ice. What I proposed was to humor it.
The outstanding feature of such vessels as the Fram and the Roosevelt was their rigidity. Their construction followed the general principle of the onion, consisting of numerous layers of heavy oak sheathing shored up from the inside with a veritable cob-web of balks, stanchions and braces. In addition to this, the sides of these ships were shaped so as to offer as small a vulnerable target as possible. The idea was that the stupendous pinch and pressure of the ice-pack failing to get a firm hold of the vessel should project her up from and out of the ice. This idea is graphically illustrated by an ordinary, household orange seed pinched sharply between the thumb and forefinger. But I could not help smiling at the naive short-sightedness of these earlier men, for, assuming as sometimes happened, that the constructive features functioned as outlined, what then? The ship was merely lifted up until she canted over at a ridiculous and uncomfortable angle where she lay on the ice, a helpless and absurd spectacle. Further motion in any direction was plainly impossible except at the whim of the floe itself which often evinces a contradictory tendency to move southward instead of northward as per schedule.
While not wishing to discard entirely the idea of elusive conformation I saw at once that radical innovations would be necessary in order to accomplish my object. In a word, I proposed to convert the Kawa into a non-rigid type of vessel.
"Triplett," I said, during our first conference, "what is the slipperiest animal you know?"