UNLOADING SHIP AT WINTER QUARTERS
The “Roosevelt” at Cape Sheridan
A still more temporary form is the small, rapidly constructed snow igloo used by traveling parties in winter and spring, and occupied only for a single night unless the travelers are held by storms. This is the kind of igloo invariably used by my parties on their sledging-trips.
The Eskimos can nearly always tell who built an igloo. Though they are all constructed on one general principle, there are always peculiarities of individual workmanship which are readily recognized by these experienced children of the North, whose horizon is so narrow that they see and remember every minute trifle.
The fundamental principle of all these houses is that warm air is lighter than cold and rises. The level of the bed and living-platform in an Eskimo igloo is always higher than the highest part of the entrance opening. In the best of the permanent winter igloos the entrance is through the floor. As a result of this construction, every bit of warm air is retained in the igloo, and the long and—whenever practicable—downward-sloping entrance tunnel prevents even the most violent air-waves of furious blizzards from penetrating the quiet interior. The vertical variations in temperature in the winter igloo of a successful hunter who has good store of blubber to keep the stove-lamps going are pronounced. On the bed platform, at the level of the lamps, the host and hostess and children are usually in their birthday suits, unless the lady, in deference to the presence of a guest, assumes a strip of seal skin half an inch wide. If one stands, bringing the head to the top of the igloo, it is like putting one’s head into a furnace. Yet a drop of water spilled on the floor of the igloo, a foot below the level of the bed platform, is instantly frozen into ice.
On several subsequent expeditions my parties wintered on board ship, and this introduced new elements. The first thing to be done by any well-managed polar expedition on reaching winter quarters is to land everything in the way of supplies and equipment and fuel, and to erect suitable shelter for the entire party ashore as a precaution against fire or other mishap to the ship. The ship should, in fact, be emptied completely.
My first practical working out of this proposition was with the Windward at Cape D’Urville in the winter of 1898–99. The boxes of supplies landed here were erected into a compact house, with a box-tunnel entrance, fitted with a small stove, and banked in completely with gravel, which in winter of course became covered with snow, giving the appearance of a snow-drift. This house, in addition to serving as insurance for the party during 1898 and 1899 in case of the loss of the Windward, lying unprotected in the ice offshore, was during the three following years a welcome haven and refuge for my parties sledging from Etah and Payer Harbor to Fort Conger.
This box-house idea was greatly extended and developed in my last two expeditions of 1905–06 and 1908–09 in the Roosevelt.
At Cape Sheridan, the winter quarters for these last two expeditions, we built box houses ashore, using the boxes containing supplies just as we did in previous years, and packing them in firmly with hay. The packing of our supplies for this purpose in boxes of certain sizes was one of the many details which determined the success of the expedition. The heavy cases of bacon, pemmican, flour, etc., were used as so many blocks in the construction of several houses about thirty feet long and fifteen feet wide. For roofs, sails thrown over boat-spars or beams were used, and later were covered in solid with snow. A stove set up in these made good workrooms for the Eskimos through the winter. On the last trip north, when the Roosevelt was caught in the grip of the ice, the Eskimos became so thoroughly frightened that they picked up their belongings and took to the box houses for the night, some of them spending the rest of the winter in them or in snow igloos.