THE CAPE JESUP GRENADIERS
On the night of August 5, a clear and sunshiny night, between Hakluyt and Northumberland Islands I left the Roosevelt and transferred to the Erik, taking Matt Henson with me, for a reconnaissance of the various Eskimo settlements on Inglefield Gulf and along the coast. This detour was for the purpose of picking up more Eskimos and dogs. The Roosevelt was sent ahead to Etah, to get in shape for her coming battle royal with the ice in Kane Basin and the channels beyond.
There was for me a strange mingling of pleasure and sadness in this gathering together of our brown-skinned helpers, for I felt that it was for the last time. The business consumed several days. I went first to Karnah, on the Redcliffe Peninsula, thence to Kangerdlooksoah and Nunatoksoah, near the head of the gulf. Returning on our course, we came back to Karnah, then went south to the neighborhood of the Itiblu Glacier, then northwest again by a devious course around the islands and the points to Kookan, in Robertson Bay, then to Nerke, on C. Saumarez, then on to Etah, where we joined the Roosevelt, having obtained all the Eskimos and dogs we needed,—two hundred and forty-six of the latter, to be exact.
There was no intention of taking to the far North all the Eskimos taken aboard the Erik and the Roosevelt—only the best of them. But if any family wanted transportation from one settlement to another, we were glad to accommodate them. It is to be doubted if anywhere on the waters of the Seven Seas there was ever a more outlandishly picturesque vessel than ours at this time—a sort of free tourist steamship for traveling Eskimos, with their chattering children, barking dogs, and other goods and chattels.
ESKIMO DOGS OF THE EXPEDITION
(246 IN ALL) ON SMALL ISLAND, ETAH FJORD
Imagine this man-and-dog-bestrewn ship, on a pleasant, windless summer day in Whale Sound. The listless sea and the overarching sky are a vivid blue in the sunlight—more like a scene in the Bay of Naples than one in the Arctic. There is a crystalline clearness in the pure atmosphere that gives to all colors a brilliancy seen nowhere else—the glittering white of the icebergs with the blue veins running through them; the deep reds, warm grays, and rich browns of the cliffs, streaked here and there with the yellows of the sandstone; a little farther away sometimes the soft green grass of this little arctic oasis; and on the distant horizon the steel-blue of the great inland ice. When the little auks fly high against the sunlit sky, they appear like the leaves of a forest when the early frost has touched them and the first gale of autumn carries them away, circling, drifting, eddying through the air. The desert of northern Africa may be as beautiful as Hichens tells us; the jungles of Asia may wear as vivid coloring; but to my eyes there is nothing so beautiful as the glittering Arctic on a sunlit summer day.
On August 11 the Erik reached Etah, where the Roosevelt was awaiting her. The dogs were landed on an island, the Roosevelt was washed, the boilers were blown down and filled with fresh water, the furnaces cleaned, and the cargo overhauled and re-stowed to put the vessel in fighting trim for her coming encounter with the ice. About three hundred tons of coal were transferred from the Erik to the Roosevelt, and about fifty tons of walrus and whale meat.
Fifty tons of coal were cached at Etah for the Roosevelt's expected return the following year. Two men, boatswain Murphy and Pritchard, the cabin boy, with full provisions for two years, were left in charge. Harry Whitney, a summer passenger on the Erik, who was ambitious to obtain musk-oxen and polar bears, asked permission to remain with my two men at Etah. The permission was granted, and Mr. Whitney's belongings were landed.