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THE OUTFITTING AND VOYAGE TO WRANGEL 105

nearest human beings, the illness which crippled our
party and the uncertainty of getting game in time. I
have always sympathized with these critics, for both my
memory and diary tell that I was a bit frightened. I
have had the feeling that in the subsequent rapid and
exhilarating recovery when they got plenty of underdone
meat to eat both sick men must have lost the memory
of their previous gloom and worry.

It took only three days until the acute symptoms of
scurvy had disappeared. There had been the blackest
gloom in their minds and pain in their every joint, but
both vanished after three days of underdone and raw
meat. Their traveling strength came back more slowly,
and it was several weeks until we were on the road again.
Only after we got back to “civilization” did I realize
that this experience had planted in the mind of Lorne
Knight a faith in the safety of northern travel even
greater than my own.

The preceding digressions are intended to show the
manner in which had been formed Knight’s ideas of
a proper outfit for living one or several years on an unin-
habited arctic island. They were based in general upon
four years of polar service and in particular upon the
two sledge journeys in which we had shared. The first
of these journeys was the longest I ever made, and in
some respects the most difficult and dangerous. It had led
us over unexplored seas covered with shifting ice and over
lands practically unknown, although they had been dis-
covered either by ourselves on previous journeys or by
others. The second of Knight’s journeys, that with
Storkerson, described in the previous chapter, can be
fairly considered one of the most remarkable in the entire
history of polar exploration, for it was then for the first