TRANSFERRING WALRUS MEAT AT ETAH
The Erik got underway soon after, and made the circuit of Wolstenholm Sound, looking for walrus, but without success. There is no ice for them to bask upon.
At the Saunders Island bird cliffs we then put in two or three hours shooting, securing 130 birds, and returned to North Star Bay. Here, the natives that I wanted were taken on board, and some thirty additional dogs purchased. Before midnight we steamed north for Whale Sound.
The next morning we were rounding magnificent Cape Parry, into Whale Sound, and steamed eastward along the southern shore to Ittibloo, where I expected to find more of my people. None were there, however, and the Erik turned northward across the Sound to Karnah, where I felt certain to find someone. Six tents were located here beside the brawling summer river, and the men were all away at Cape Cleveland, hunting walrus with one of the whaleboats which I had given them three years before. From the women, I learned that about ten families were up the gulf at Kangerdlooksoah and that vicinity. Telling the natives here, as at the other places, to get their things in readiness to come on board when the ship returned, we steamed eastward into Inglefield Gulf. No ice was to be seen here, but there was a most unusual profusion of bergs from the great Heilprin and Melville Glaciers at the head of the Gulf. At times it looked as if there were no thoroughfare among the bergs, but a closer approach in every case showed winding passages among them, and off Kangerdlooksoah there were comparatively few.
Here, where I had left my faithful people three years before, I found now six tents, the occupants of all but one of them young and active men. The number of dogs, and the goodly supply of skins which these people have, made the process of moving a little slower than at some of the other places, but everybody and everything was finally on board, leaving the place, which a few hours before had been enlivened by the voices of children and the barking of dogs, deserted. From Kangerdlooksoah we steamed north across the head of the Gulf to Harvard Islands, on the northernmost of which were four tents. These, like the others, were embarked as soon as possible, and at half-past two the morning of the 11th, the Erik was ready to steam down the Gulf again.
The scene and the surroundings during this typical Arctic summer night were such as to be long remembered. The surface of the Gulf like a placid mirror, thickly dotted in every direction with fragments of ice and icebergs, of all sizes and shapes, and flanked on the east and north by the gigantic amphitheatre of the Heilprin, Tracy, and Melville Glaciers rising to the steel-blue slopes of the “great ice,” while northwest and west rose the warm red-brown bluffs of Mounts Daly and Adams, and Josephine Peary Island, and to the south the rolling slopes of the Kangerdlooksoah deer pastures. During the remainder of the night we steamed down the Gulf, and in the forenoon we were on the walrus grounds between Herbert Island and the north shore of the Sound.
THE AUXILIARY S. S. “ERIK” IN THE HARBOUR OF ETAH
THE BARRIER AT CAPE COLLINSON