A disagreeable feature of this time was the frequent occurrence of violent southerly winds varying from vicious squalls of a few hours’ duration to furious gales lasting two or three days. These winds invariably denuded the land in our vicinity of snow and were always accompanied by more or less extended open water. As late as October 16th, a ship located south of Rawson could have come around that cape and made our present location with even greater ease than did the Roosevelt on the 5th of September. On one occasion such a ship could have gone on without obstruction to Cape Joseph Henry, passing about one hundred yards outside of our position. Naturally under these conditions the mean temperature was unexpectedly high.
October 1st, our large game score reached seventy-three musk-oxen and twenty-seven reindeer, just an even hundred. On this date small stoves were set up for the first time in the after house. October 2d, the boilers were blown off for the winter. October 3d, I started to make a reconnoissance of our spring route to Hecla, as my observations in 1902 had satisfied me that there was a better route than that followed by the English across Fielden Peninsula. I also wished to examine Clements Markham Inlet for musk-oxen. Two marches from the ship took me to the mouth of Clements Markham Inlet, one day of thick weather was devoted to a trip part way into the inlet and back; and the next two brought me back to the ship, my anxiety for her having prevented my remaining out as long as I wished. It was a new and not particularly agreeable feeling to me to be hampered by the cares of a ship, and thus kept from active fieldwork, but I accepted the conditions and shifted the burden of the remainder of the fall and winter work to the younger shoulders in the party. On the 9th, our large winter lamps were put in commission for the first time. On the 13th, I snowshoed to the summit of Black Cape and saw the sun for the last time, peering for a moment through the misty ice-filled opening of Robeson Channel to the south. From Cape Sheridan, past Rawson, and on down past Cape Union there was plenty of open water and across the mouth of the channel to Repulse Harbour there was nothing but light trash ice. For a few moments the sun’s rays lit the entire southern summit line of the United States Range, crested Mount Cheops with rose, and just touched the peaks of Cape Joseph Henry. It was so low, however, that the shadow both of Greenland and of Grant Land reached northward across the pack ice to the blue-black northern horizon except where it streamed through between the precipitous walls of the Channel itself forming a broad band of yellow light between the shadows on either side, “the Gateway to the Polar Sea.”
October 16th was marked by the most violent gale we had had since leaving home. This gale left the land almost as bare as in summer, and the water formed by it was more extensive than at any time for a month. After all these gales, Cape Joseph Henry stands out in black and savage profile. Of all capes fronting the Polar Sea along the coasts of Greenland and Grant Land, this is the most ideal.
Soon after this, with almost the suddenness of lightning from a clear sky, I faced the possibility of the complete crippling of the expedition by the extermination of my large pack of dogs. About eighty of these indispensable animals died before the cause was traced to poisoning from the whale meat which I had taken for dog-food. This meat to the amount of several tons was thrown away, and I found myself confronted at the beginning of the long Arctic night with the proposition of subsisting my dogs and most of my Eskimos upon the country.
Without my previous familiarity with the region, this would have been an absolute impossibility; even as it was, it possessed elements of uncertainty, but with the satisfactory start already made in obtaining musk-oxen, and knowing that these animals could be killed by those who knew how, even in the depths of the great Arctic night, I believed there was somewhat more than a fighting chance for success.
THE “ROOSEVELT” IMMEDIATELY AFTER ARRIVAL AT CAPE SHERIDAN
THE “ALERT’S” CAIRN AT FLOEBERG BEACH
