Up to Cape Stanton we had to hew a continuous road along the ice-foot. After this the going was much better to Cape Bryant. Off this section of the coast the pack was in constant motion, and an almost continuous lane of water extended along the ice-foot. A long search at Cape Bryant finally discovered the remains of Lockwood’s cache and cairn, which had been scattered by bears. Three marches, mostly in thick weather, and over alternating hummocky blue ice and areas of deep snow, brought us at 1 A. M. of May 4th to Cape North (the northern point of Cape Britannia Island). From this camp, after a sleep, I sent back two more Eskimos and the twelve poorest dogs, leaving Henson, one Eskimo, and myself, with three sledges and sixteen dogs, for the permanent advance party.
From Cape North a ribbon of young ice on the so-called tidal crack, which extends along this coast, gave us a good lift nearly across Nordenskjold Inlet. Then it became unsafe, and we climbed a heavy rubble barrier to the old floe ice inside, which we followed to Cape Benêt, and camped. Here we were treated to another snowstorm.
Another strip of young ice gave us a passage nearly across Mascart Inlet, until, under Cape Payer, I found it so broken up that two of the sledges and nearly all of the dogs got into the water before we could escape from it. Then a pocket of snow, thigh and waist deep, over rubble ice under the lee of the Cape stalled us completely. I pitched the tent, fastened the dogs, and we devoted the rest of the day to stamping a road through the snow with our snowshoes. Even then, when we started the next day I was obliged to put two teams to one sledge in order to move it.
Cape Payer was a hard proposition. The first half of the distance round it we were obliged to cut a road, and on the latter half, with twelve dogs and three men to each sledge to push and pull them, snowplow fashion, through the deep snow.
Distant Cape was almost equally inhospitable, and it was only after long and careful reconnoissance that we were able to get our sledges past along the narrow crest of the huge ridge of ice forced up against the rocks. After this we had comparatively fair going, on past Cape Ramsay, Dome Cape, and across Meigs Fiord, as far as Mary Murray Island. Then came some heavy going, and at 11:40 P. M. of May 8th we reached Lockwood’s cairn on the north end of Lockwood Island. From this cairn I took the record and thermometer deposited there by Lockwood eighteen years before. The record was in a perfect state of preservation.
One march from here carried us to Cape Washington. Just at midnight we reached the low point, which is visible from Lockwood Island, and great was my relief, to see on rounding this point, another splendid headland, with two magnificent glaciers debouching near it, rising across an intervening inlet. I knew now that Cape Washington was not the northern point of Greenland, as I had feared. It would have been a great disappointment to me, after coming so far, to find that another’s eyes had forestalled mine in looking first upon the coveted northern point.
Nearly all my hours for sleep at this camp were taken up by observations and a round of angles. The ice north from Cape Washington was in a frightful condition—utterly impracticable. Leaving Cape Washington we crossed the mouth of the fiord, packed with blue-top floe-bergs, to the western edge of one of the big glaciers, and then over the extremity of the glacier itself, camping near the edge of the second. Here I found myself in the midst of the birthplace of the “floe-bergs,” which could be seen in all the various stages of formation. These “floe-bergs” are merely degraded icebergs; that is, bergs of low altitude, detached from the extremity of a glacier, which has for some distance been forcing its way along a comparatively level and shallow sea bottom.
From this camp we crossed the second glacier, then a small fiord, where we killed a polar bear.
It was evident to me now that we were very near the northern extremity of the land; and when we came within view of the next point ahead I felt that my eyes rested at last upon the Arctic Ultima Thule (Cape Morris K. Jesup). The land ahead also impressed me at once as showing the characteristics of a musk-ox country.
This point was reached in the next march, and I stopped to take variation and latitude sights. Here my Eskimo shot a hare, and we saw a wolf track and traces of musk-oxen. A careful reconnoissance of the pack to the northward, with glasses, from an elevation of a hundred feet, showed the ice to be of a less impracticable character than it was north of Cape Washington. What were evidently water clouds showed very distinctly on the horizon. This water sky had been apparent ever since we left Cape Washington, and at one time assumed such a shape that I was almost deceived into taking it for land. Continued careful observation destroyed the illusion. My observations completed, we started northward over the pack, and camped a few miles from land.