The upper works were a watertight box and nothing more, about six feet in height, made up of two skins, between which was packed asbestos, built strongly, with no doors or windows. A few covered eyelets allowed a poor sort of ventilation which could be improved by opening the manhole on top, through which entrance to the inside was to be made. Through this manhole everything we carried was introduced; the sledges and kayaks were placed on its roof. This box-cabin covered three-fourths of the length of the boat. The bow admitted the socket and step for a mast and a small sail. It had no beauty, no speed, but we believed it was adaptable to the vicissitudes of travel before us, because of its amphibious properties. If fairly caught in an ice jam it would be crushed like a peanut shell, but it was intended to rise on the ice, and we expected to save it from the contingency of any ice chancery by keeping it on open fields of ice.
The conditions before us welcomed this treatment, or at least we thought so. We could give it a load of two tons, which affords an equivalent of one ton in traction force to haul, so that forty dogs, pulling fifty pounds each, would draw it, and this was a very lenient exaction. Circumstances vary, and the phases of Arctic mutability are almost incalculable, but once on the ice we anticipated success. The weak feature of our plan was the late start. If nothing could be negotiated, in the slang parlance of exploration, we would return to Point Barrow and wait until later.
The long days invited us and the calculable chance of escaping the awful winter storms. What we probably could not cross were the large pressure ridges which are perhaps twenty feet high, a fourth of a mile in width, and which contain individual masses of ice as big as a small house, all in a gallimaufry of confusion. But we would flank them somehow; that was our purpose. The summer might give us good leads, winding, penetrating lanes of water drifting through labyrinthine courses to the “promised land.” It was there, and it grew in our thoughts every day as more and more desirable. We did not care at what point we hit it. Four hundred miles ahead of us somewhere lay terra firma, and the conception grew in magnitude, not as another Greenland buried under thousands of feet of snow, a monstrous, appalling desert of ice scoured by hurricanes and chilled in death with a temperature half a hundred below zero. No! By an incomprehensible infatuation (the Professor had warped our judgments by his indefatigable promises) we were convinced that Krocker Land contained the resources of life.
Had not Peary at Independence Bay, on the very northern edge of Greenland, found flowers, grass and musk oxen? Had he not, when driving for the pole, “repeatedly passed fresh tracks of bear and hare together with numerous fox tracks”? And then those uncovered veins of gold seaming the primal rocks, how they swam before our eyes in yellow reticulations over square miles of quartz! We had become decidedly crazy about it all, for, unexpressed, but cherished in our deepest hearts were fantastic hopes of some indescribable faunal, floral, human remnant, like Conan Doyle’s “Lost World” or the Kosekin in De Mille’s “Strange MS in a Copper Cylinder” in the Antarctic, and that romantic and sufficing Paradise that Paine depicted in “The Great White Way,” or even the nightmare trances and inventions, the megalithic splendors and horrific glories of Atvatabar, or the mythic creatures in Etidorhpa. And yet our extravagancies of imagination were all finally obliterated, even to memory, in the grandeur and miracle of Reality.
In one respect we altered our first plan. Hopkins had wished to have three Americans selected to bring back our launch, and to pick us up again the next summer. We changed that. We would never come back, or if there were disappointments (“Inconceivable,” said the Professor) we would get back our own way unaided, and—
(Erickson looked at me solemnly, and his voice struck a sepulchral tone that would have done credit to Paris at the tomb of the Capulets.)
“And Mr. Link, I am the only one that did come back. The Professor and Hopkins are in Krocker Land today; Goritz is dead.”
(He resumed his narration.)
Captain Coogan steamed over to the ice pack which lay beyond the shore channels of open water, towing our launch, which certainly now seemed to dwindle into an inconsiderable implement of insertion in that trackless ocean of ice. He pushed his way through the “slob” ice, and jammed the nose of the “Astrum” upon the bulwarks of a great floe, whose uneven, rumpled and snow encumbered surface receded into a measureless distance, veiled, gray, dismal. We disembarked with the dogs, the launch came alongside, Goritz started the engine and she bucked the ice hopelessly. Then we windlassed her onto the pack, harnessed the dogs to her in five teams, one pack from the bow, two amidships and two at the stern, and started. Goritz and I were good teamsters, and Hopkins made a fair try at it, with promiscuous difficulties. The rudder and tiller were unshipped. It looked as if she would “go.” We did not make fifty feet in our trial, but the dogs certainly could pull her easily on her bone runners. Then came the unloading of our supplies from the steamer.
The day was most favorable, clear, cold and still. The wind with its usual aptitude for mischief in these northern asylums of meteorological chaos, was waiting to catch us later. We packed the supplies, sledges, two kayaks, guns, ammunition, stoves, oil, pemmican, and the assorted constituents of the regular provisioning of an Arctic expedition, into and on the launch, which made a very original and unique picture. The Eskimos who came offshore with the steamer and the dogs themselves seemed quite thoroughly perplexed, and doubtless entertained unspoken and unfavorable opinions as to our final success, and the dogs were perhaps dubious as to their own fate.