The most trying thing for sledges, dogs, and men is the side sluing of a sledge in rough ice, gathering momentum as it goes, only to bring up with a side crash against a piece of steel-blue ice. This worries and discourages the dogs by jerking them off their feet, strains the driver sometimes seriously in his efforts to soften the crash, and in my earlier sledges I have often had a side split from end to end and bent flat under the sledge. This means unloading the sledge, work at it for two or three hours, then reloading, all in temperatures far below zero. Not until my last two expeditions did I find the material—cold sheared steel—which met my requirements for sledge-shoes.
Another absolute essential in every sledge is that there shall be no rigid joints. Such joints go to everlasting smash very quickly under the continuous succession of blows, with the entire weight of the load acting as a hammer at every impact with the flinty ice. Every joint must be lashed,—preferably with rawhide,—thus giving a certain elasticity, which eases the blow. Some expeditions have never learned this, but the Eskimos have worked it out very thoroughly, and I availed myself fully of their wonderful ingenuity and adaptation of lashings and knots for the different parts of a sledge.
There are numbers of little details in the construction of an ideal, easy-running, easy-steering sledge that are as important as the proper angle for the cutting edge of a tool in various materials, but which it would be tedious if not impossible to describe here.
This native art of sledge-building, not only the common knowledge of the tribe, but the individual knowledge of the picked Eskimos of my expedition, I was able to utilize for my sledge-equipment by the simple expedient of having every man build his own sledge, material and tools of course being furnished by me. The desire to excel the other fellow, which the better men of this tribe possess, and the wish to reduce to a minimum his own personal labor and discomfort led each man to put forth every effort to make his sledge the lightest, strongest, most unbreakable, and the easiest running and most readily steered.
Thus my own practical experience of twenty years, the experience of generations of the tribe, the individual ambition and pride of my picked men, the best of material and tools, and the long hours of the winter night in which to work—all combined to give me what I have no hesitation in considering the best sledge-equipment that ever went into the field.
I also used on my last expedition the regular type of sledge which has been in use among the Eskimos since the early days when they had to depend on the bones of the walrus and whale and the antlers of the deer for material for building them. This type of sledge has two oak runners seven inches in height and one and a quarter inch in thickness. These are steel shod but are curved only at the front. To render them better adapted to the special work before us, I increased the length of these Eskimo sledges from six or seven feet to nine and a half feet.
Sledges intended for inland work differ slightly from those to be used in sea-ice work. Deep, soft snow is generally prevalent in the interior regions, and to keep a sledge from sinking into it, it must be equipped with broad, flat runners. There can also be a decided gain in lightness in the sledges for this class of work, although the strong winds of the ice-cap carve portions of it into sharp, almost marble-like sastrugi, which tests the power of endurance of the strongest of sledges. None of those used by me in my Greenland inland-ice cap-work weighed over fifty pounds, while those used on my trip to the pole averaged ninety-five pounds.
Next after the ship, Eskimos, the Eskimo dogs, and special sledges, a vital tool for the polar explorer is the clothing for himself and the members of his party on his serious sledge-journeys. The meaning of suitable clothing on a serious polar sledge-journey goes beyond the mere personal comfort of the wearer. Fur clothing of suitable material, properly made and intelligently worn, means conservation of the vital heat and energy of the wearer, which can thus all be devoted to the object of the party, covering distance. Unsuitable clothing, as represented by the cumbersome, awkward, heavy, and ludicrous outfits of various expeditions, including some of my earliest ones, means the wastage of from fifty to seventy-five per cent. of the wearer’s warmth and energy in the struggle to keep alive, leaving only from fifty to twenty-five per cent. to be devoted to the work. A parallel illustration is that of two similar engines generating the same power but one of them consuming fifty per cent. or more of that power in overcoming its own frictional resistances, while the other uses only five per cent. for this purpose.
POLAR SLEDGE COSTUME