While the oil was being unloaded, a party of men went out with ice chisels, poles, saws, and so forth, chopping away the ice so that we could warp the Roosevelt in, broadside to the shore. Bartlett and I were determined to get the ship beyond the floe-berg barrier and into the shallow water of the ice-foot. We were not looking forward to another winter of such torment as we had lived through on the last previous expedition, with the ship just on the edge of the ice-foot and subject to every movement of the hostile pack outside.
THE ROOSEVELT ON SEPTEMBER 12, 1908
Marie Ahnighito Peary's Birthday
After the oil cases came the tons of whale meat from the quarter-deck, some of it in chunks as large as a Saratoga trunk. It was thrown over the side onto the ice, sledged ashore by the Eskimos, some hundred yards over the ice-foot, and heaped in great piles, protected by the bags of coal which had also been taken from the quarter-deck. Then came the whale-boats, which were lowered from the davits and run ashore like sledges. They were later turned bottom side up for the winter and weighted down, so that the wind could not move them.
"PEARY" SLEDGES ON BOARD THE ROOSEVELT
The work of landing the supplies and equipment consumed several days. This is the very first work of every well-managed arctic expedition on reaching winter quarters. With the supplies ashore, the loss of the ship by fire or by crushing in the ice, would mean simply that the party might have to walk home. It would not interfere with the sledge work, nor seriously cripple the expedition. Had we lost the Roosevelt at Cape Sheridan, we should have spent the winter in the box houses which we constructed and in the spring should have made the dash for the Pole just the same. We should then have walked the three hundred and fifty miles to Cape Sabine, crossed the Smith Sound ice to Etah, and waited for a ship.
The adjacent shore for a quarter of a mile was lined with boxes, each item of provisions having a pile to itself. This packing-box village was christened Hubbardville, in honor of General Thomas H. Hubbard, president of the Peary Arctic Club. When the boxes which had served as a bed platform in the Eskimo quarters of the Roosevelt's forward deck were removed, the place was swept and scrubbed; then a bed platform was built of boards, divided into sections for the various families and screened in front by curtains. Under the bed platform was an open space, where the Eskimos could keep their cooking utensils and other personal belongings. The fastidious reader who is shocked at the idea of keeping frying-pans under the bed should see an Eskimo family in one of their native houses of stone and earth, eight feet across, where meat and drink, men, women, and children are crowded indiscriminately for month upon month in winter.