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Chapter VI.
The Outfitting and the Voyage to Wrangell

At Home the party gave the finishing touches to their
simple outfit; all decisions were based upon the extensive
Arctic experience of Knight and Maurer. They never reported
to me exactly what they were taking and I never worried about
the omission, for my views were the same as theirs. What
these were can best he made clear by repeating a story which
Knight used to tell when trying to explain the Arctic to people
who had never been north. I have told the story myself in
print but never so fully as I shall now, for the lesson of it
has never been so pertinent.

In the late winter of 1917 Knight found himself one
of a party of four who were traveling with two dog teams at
about SO.5° North Latitude and 110° West Longitude. There
were two other white men in the party, Harold Hoice and myself,
and an Eskimo boy of about twenty, Emiu or Split-the-Wind. For
both Knight and Noice it was towards the end of the second year
of their Arctic experience. Although Emiu was an Eskimo, he
had really no more experience than they, for he had been brought
up in the city of Nome and had hunted only rabbits and ptarmigan
somewhat as a farm boy might hunt rabbits and grouse farther
south. I was in command and It was my ninth winter of polar
travel. Both officially and by experience I was in command
and our general course was planned by me. Apart from that
general consideration, our progress and success depended about
equally upon each one of us. four.

According to the devious course one would have to
travel by reason of the configuration of lands and seas, we were
when the trouble came upon us about seven hundred miles from our