For a few minutes on one of the marches the fog lifted, giving us a magnificent panorama of the north coast mountains. Very sombre and savage they looked, towering white as marble with the newly fallen snow, under their low, threatening canopy of lead-coloured clouds. Two herds of musk-oxen were passed, one of fifteen and one of eighteen, and two or three stragglers. Four of these were shot for dog-food, and the skin of one, killed within less than a mile of the extreme northern point, has been brought back as a trophy for the Club.
Once free of the fog off Mary Murray Island we made rapid progress, reaching Cape North in four marches from Cape Washington. Clear weather showed us the existence of open water a few miles off the shore, extending from Dome Cape to Cape Washington. At Black Cape there was a large open water reaching from the shore northward. Everywhere along this coast I was impressed by the startling evidence of the violence of the blizzard of a few days before. The polar pack had been driven resistlessly in against the iron coast, and at every projecting point had risen to the crest of the ridge of old ice, along the outer edge of the ice-foot, in a terrific cataract of huge blocks. In places these mountains of shattered ice were 100 feet or more in height. The old ice in the bays and fiords had had its outer edge loaded with a great ridge of ice fragments, and was itself cracked and crumpled into huge swells by the resistless pressure. All the young ice which had helped us on our onward passage had been crushed into countless fragments and swallowed up in the general chaos.
Though hampered by fog, the passage from Cape North to Cape Bryant was made in twenty-five and one-half marching hours. At 7 A. M. of the 6th of June we camped on the end of the ice-foot, at the eastern end of Black Horn Cliffs. A point a few hundred feet up the bluffs, commanding the region in front of the cliffs, showed it to be filled by small pieces of old ice, held in place against the shore by pressure of the outside pack. It promised at best the heaviest kind of work, with the certainty that it would run abroad at the first release of pressure.
The next day, when about one-third the way across, the ice did begin to open out, and it was only after a rapid and hazardous dash from cake to cake that we reached an old floe, which, after several hours of heavy work, allowed us to climb upon the ice-foot of the western end of the cliffs.
From here on rapid progress was made again, three more marches taking us to Conger, where we arrived at 1:30 A. M., June 10th, though the open water between Repulse Harbour and Cape Brevoort, which had now expanded down Robeson Channel to a point below Cape Sumner, and the rotten ice under Cape Sumner, hampered us seriously. In passing I took copies of the Beaumont English Records from the cairn at Repulse Harbour, and brought them back for the archives of the Club. They form one of the finest chapters of the most splendid courage, fortitude and endurance, under dire stress of circumstances, that is to be found in the history of Arctic explorations.
In this journey I had determined, conclusively, the northern limit of the Greenland Archipelago or land group, and had practically connected the coast southward to Independence Bay, leaving only that comparatively short portion of the periphery of Greenland lying between Independence Bay and Cape Bismarck indeterminate. The non-existence of land, for a very considerable distance to the northward and northeastward, was also settled, with every indication pointing to the belief that the coast along which we travelled formed the shore of an uninterrupted central Polar sea, extending to the Pole, and beyond to the Spitzbergen and Franz Joseph Land groups of the opposite hemisphere.
The origin of the floe-bergs and paleocrystic ice was definitely determined. Further than this, the result of the journey was to eliminate this route as a desirable or practicable one by which to reach the Pole. The broken character of the ice, the large amount of open water, and the comparatively rapid motion of the ice, as it swung round the northern coast into the southerly setting East Greenland current, were very unfavourable features.
During my absence some thirty-three musk-oxen and ten seals had been secured in the vicinity of Conger; caches for my return had been established at Thank God Harbour, Cape Lieber, and Lincoln Bay, and sugar, milk and tea had been brought up from the various caches between Conger and Cape Louis Napoleon.
July was passed by a portion of the party in the region from Discovery Harbour westward, via Black Rock Vale and Lake Hazen, where some forty musk-oxen were secured.
During August and early September various other hunting trips of shorter duration were made, resulting in the killing of some twenty musk-oxen.