This channel is the meeting place between the tides coming from Baffin Bay on the south and from Lincoln Sea on the north, the actual point of meeting being about Cape Frazer. South of that point the flood tide runs north, and north of it the flood tide runs south. One may judge of the force of these tides from the fact that on the shores of the Polar Sea the mean rise is only a little over a foot, while in the narrowest part of the channel the tide rises and falls twelve or fourteen feet.
As a rule, looking across the channel, there seems to be no water—nothing but uneven and tortured ice. When the tide is at the ebb, the ship follows the narrow crack of water between the shore and the moving pack of the center, driving ahead with all her force; then, when the flood tide begins to rush violently southward, the ship must hurry to shelter in some niche of the shore ice, or behind some point of rock, to save herself from destruction or being driven south again.
This method of navigation, however, is one of constant hazard, as it keeps the vessel between the immovable rocks and the heavy and rapidly drifting ice, with the ever-present possibility of being crushed between the two. My knowledge of the ice conditions of these channels and their navigation was absolutely my own, gained in former years of traveling along the shores and studying them for this very purpose. On my various expeditions I had walked every foot of the coast line, from Payer Harbor on the south to Cape Joseph Henry on the north, from three to eight times. I knew every indentation of that coast, every possible shelter for a ship, every place where icebergs usually grounded, and the places where the tide ran strongest, as accurately as a tugboat captain in New York harbor knows the piers of the North River water front. When Bartlett was in doubt as to making a risky run, with the chance of not finding shelter for the ship, I could usually say to him:
"At such and such a place, so far from here, is a little niche behind the delta of a stream, where we can drive the Roosevelt in, if necessary"; or:
"Here icebergs are almost invariably grounded, and we can find shelter behind them"; or:
"Here is a place absolutely to be shunned, for the floes pile up here at the slightest provocation, in a way that would destroy any ship afloat."
It was this detailed knowledge of every foot of the Ellesmere Land and Grant Land coasts, combined with Bartlett's energy and ice experience, that enabled us to pass four times between this arctic Scylla and Charybdis.
The fog lifted about nine o'clock the first night out, the sun peeped through the clouds, and as we passed Payer Harbor, on the Ellesmere Land side, we saw, sharply outlined against the snow, the house where I wintered in 1901-2. A flood of memories rushed over me at sight of the place. It was in Payer Harbor that Mrs. Peary and my little daughter had waited for me, on the Windward from September, 1900, to May, 1901, the ice being so heavy that year that the ship could neither reach Fort Conger, three hundred miles beyond, where I was, nor regain the open water to the south and return home. That was the spring when I had been obliged to turn back at Lincoln Bay, because the exhaustion of my Eskimos and dogs made a dash for the Pole impossible. It was at Payer Harbor that I had rejoined my family; it was at Payer Harbor that I had parted from them, determined to make one fight more to reach the goal.
"One fight more," I said in 1902; but I had only reached 84° 17´.
"One fight more," I had said in 1905; but I had only reached 87° 6´.