On the morning of the 24th I started north with nine sledges. We camped the first night at “Depot B.” The next march I had counted on making Lincoln Bay, but just before reaching Wrangel Bay a sudden furious gale with blinding drift drove us into camp at the south point of the bay. Here we were storm-bound during the 26th, but got away on the morning of the 27th and pushed on to Cape Union, encountering along this portion of the coast the steep side slopes of hard snow, which are so trying to men and sledges and dogs.
Open water, the clouds over which we saw from Wrangel Bay Camp, was about 100 yards beyond our igloo, and extended from there, as I judged, northward beyond Cape Rawson, and reached entirely across the channel to the Greenland coast at Cape Brevoort, as in 1900.
Fortunately, with the exercise of utmost care, and with a few narrow escapes, and incessant hard work, we were able to work our sledges along the narrow and dangerous ice-foot to and around Black Cape.
The ice-foot along this section of the coast was the same as was found here by Egerton and Rawson in 1876, and Pavy in 1882, necessitating the hewing of an almost continuous road; but a party of willing, lighthearted Eskimos makes comparatively easy work of what would be a slow and heart-breaking job for two or three white men. Beyond Black Cape the ice-foot improved in character, and I pushed along to camp at the Alert’s winter quarters. Simultaneously with seeing the Alert’s cairn three musk-oxen were seen a short distance inland, and secured. The animals were very thin and furnished but a scant meal for my dogs.
One march from here carried us to Cape Richardson, and the next under the lee of View Point, where we were stopped and driven to build our igloo with all possible speed by one of the common Arctic gales. There were young ice, pools of water, and a nearly continuous water sky all along the shore.
As the last march had been through deep snow, I did not dare to attempt the English short cut across Fielden Peninsula behind Cape Joseph Henry, preferring to take the ice-foot route round it.
For a short distance this was the worst bit of ice-foot I have ever encountered. By the slipping of my sledge two men nearly lost their lives, saving themselves by the merest chance, with their feet already dangling over the crest of a vertical face of ice some fifty feet in height. At the very extremity of the cape we were forced to pass our sledges along a shelf of ice, less than three feet in width, glued against the face of the cliff at an elevation which I estimated at the time as seventy-five feet above the ragged surface of the floe beneath. On the western side of the cape the ice-foot broadened and became nearly level, but was smothered in such a depth of light snow that it stalled us and we went into camp. The next day we made Crozier Island.
During April 2d and 3d we were held here by a westerly storm, and the 4th and 5th were devoted to hunting musk-oxen, of which three were secured, two of them being very small. From here I sent back three Eskimos, keeping Henson and four Eskimos with me.
Reconnoissances of the polar pack northward were made with the glasses from the summit of the island and from Cape Hecla.
The pack was very rough, but apparently not as bad as that which I saw north of Cape Washington two years before. Though unquestionably difficult, it yet looked as though we might make some progress through it unless the snow was too deep and soft. This was a detail which the glasses could not determine.