Contrary to popular opinion, a trail across sea ice or inland ice made by the passage of a party of several sledges and teams of dogs can be recognized and followed by those who have the training and knowledge, weeks or even months afterward. A snow-storm does not obliterate a trail for any considerable consecutive distance. In these latitudes a fall of snow is usually soon followed by wind, and while this wind may drift and pack snow over one section of the trail a few hundred yards in length, in other places it will scour the snow away and leave the straight lines of the sledge-runners, the print of a man’s moccasin, or the five-leaf clover-like impression of a dog’s foot standing up in relief from the surrounding surface. Every effort, however, was made in my work to strengthen the marking of the trail, and thus make it easier to follow on the return march, because retaining the trail was such a vital matter in the interests of speed and conservation of energy. Tins of pemmican emptied at each camp in feeding the dogs and members of the party—these tins being painted bright red or blue—were cut in half and left on a pinnacle of ice or sticking up in the trail every half-mile or so of the next march.
Tired dogs near the end of a march can be brightened up and enticed over the last mile or two if the leader of the party snow-shoeing in advance of the sledges, indulges in the Eskimo pantomime of sighting, following, and creeping up upon an imaginary seal, polar bear, or musk-oxen. In crossing comparatively narrow lanes of very thin young ice, where a driver was obliged to cross in another place than the sledge in order not to concentrate the weight too much, and where it was vital that the dogs should go across at full speed and not stop until the load was across, for if they did, the sledge would go through, I sent one man across in advance to a place fifty or a hundred feet on the firm ice beyond the other edge of the lead, and then in plain sight of the dogs he would stoop down and chop up an imaginary piece of walrus meat, at the same time giving the food-call to the dogs. As a result of this deception, the dogs could hardly be restrained, and when at the proper moment they were allowed to start, nothing short of an earthquake could stop the team till it had reached the man on the other side. On one or two occasions the sledge partly breaking through before the other side was reached, was rushed out of the water and to safety by the dash and impetus of the dogs. This same method is also practicable in crossing the snow-bridges of the masked crevasses of the great ice of Greenland and the antarctic regions.
CONCLUSION
At the request of friends I have turned away briefly from other work to take up the threads of the past and write this book.
That other work which has been demanding my attention has a very pronounced bearing on polar exploration, and in fact upon all exploration.
Five years ago at the annual dinner of the Explorers’ Club I ventured the prophecy that in a few years the polar regions would be reconnoitered and explored through the air. The last three years of warfare abroad have forced the development of the aeroplane to such a degree that the time is now very near when aeroplanes will have such extended radius of certain flight as will make the preliminary reconnaissance of the unknown areas in the north and south polar regions a matter of a few weeks instead of several years.
The sheltered inlets of Bowdoin and McCormick Bays in Whale Sound, Greenland, are readily accessible every summer to a ship like the Roosevelt and an ice master like Bartlett. In these inlets during August there are days and days of brilliant, calm, warm weather, with temperature above the freezing point, and it is continuous daylight throughout the entire twenty-four hours all through the month.
Four hundred miles due north—four hours’ aeroplane flight—is Cape Columbia, the most northerly point of the North American world segment, and less than 500 miles from the pole.
A squadron of aeroplanes starting from Bowdoin or McCormick Bays would reach Cape Columbia in a few hours with the whole panorama of Grant Land and the American gateway to the pole passing beneath, could alight on the firm level “glacial fringe” at Cape Columbia, unload their supplies and gasoline, and the supporting machines be back at their base in less than a day.
From Cape Columbia it is less than 1400 miles in a straight line directly across and over the pole to Cape Chelyuskin on the Siberian Coast, the most northern point of Eurasia. To Wrangel Island across Crocker Land and the entirely unexplored region between the pole and Bering Strait it is about 1500 miles.