stefansson-wrangel-09-27-022

2
65

own nearest ship and about the same distance from the nearest
other human beings, the Eskimos of Victoria Island. We were
on the open ocean, a hundred and forty miles from the last
land we had seen, Meighen Island, and more than a hundred
miles northwest of the nearest land, Ellef Ringnes. The ice
we were traveling over was in sluggish motion, the direction
depending upon the winds which not only drove it before them
but also broke it into fragments, some the size of a piano,
some as big as a farm and the largest perhaps fifteen or twenty
miles across. Most of this ice had been formed the previous
year and was heavy; but some was only a few days old, thin
and treacherous. There were also long lanes of open water
between the floes, yards or miles in width and vast, many-
cornered areas here and there. Although Some of the floes were
a hundred feet thick and they averaged only a little heavier than a good deal heavier than
the polar ice as a whole. say four or five feet. The average thickness of winter ice in the
Beaufort Sea would be
about four or five feet.

The ice was exceptionally heavy, but we did not real-
ize that so much through its appearance as through the compar-
ative scarcity of seals and the entire absence of polar bears.
It was one of the poorest game districts I had ever traversed,
and the poorest ever seen by my companions. But they were
cheerful, for they relied upon our uniform experience that on
the polar sea the areas devoid of game, while possible anywhere,
are never of very large extent. One can always find game by
merely traveling doggedly ahead in any constant direction.
Vacillating and zigzagging might confine you within such an
area but a straight course would will certainly take you out.

But in this case consistent constant progress became impossible,
for two of our party of four were became seriously ill. Both Knight
and Noice had been complaining of lassitude, pain in their