"March 21, Wednesday. — On this day one year ago Mr. Brooks and his party were frozen up in the hummocks. The habit of comparing the condition of two periods, of balancing the thoughts and hopes of one with the realized experience of the other, seems to me a very unprofitable one. It interferes with the practical executive spirit of a man, to mix a bright and happy past with a dim and doubtful present. It's a maudlin piece of work at best, and I'll none of it.
"But listen to poor Brooks there, talking. He is sitting up, congratulating himself that he can nearly straighten his worst leg. 'Well, Mr. Ohlsen, I thought we would never get through them hummocks. You know we unloaded three times; now, I would not say it then, but seeing I am down I'll tell you. When we laid down the last pemmican-case, I went behind the ice, and don't remember nothing till Petersen called me into the tent. I think I must have strained something, and gone off like in a kind of fit.'
"Ohlsen, who is as self-absorbed a man as I ever knew, replies by stating that his boots pinched him; to which poor Brooks, never dwelling long on his own troubles, says in a quiet, soliloquizing way, 'Yes, and Baker's boots pinched him too; but it wasn't the boots, but the killing cold outside of them. There was Pierre: his boots were moccasins, with deer-skin foot-rags, but he died of cold for all that; and there's Mr. Wilson and me, both hanging on in neither one way nor t'other: it's a question which of us lasts the longest.' McGary, another bedridden, but convalescent, I hope, here raises himself on his elbows and checks Brooks for being so down in the mouth; and Brooks, after a growling rejoinder, improves his merry reminiscences by turning to me.
" 'Captain Kane, five nights to come one year, you came in upon four of us down as flat as flounders. I didn't look at your boots, but I know you wore Esquimaux ones. It was a hard walk for you, the greatest thing I ever heard tell of; but' — here he begins to soliloquize — 'Baker's dead, Pierre's dead, and Wilson and I — .' 'Shut up, Brooks! shut up!' I broke in, whispering across the boards that separated our blankets; 'you will make the patients uncomfortable.' But no: the old times were strong upon him; he did not speak loud, but he caught me by both hands, and said, in his low bass, quiet tones, 'Doctor, you cried when you saw us, and didn't pull up till we jabbed the stopper down the whiskey-tin and gave you a tot of it.'
"The general tone of the conversation around is like this specimen. I am glad to hear my shipmates talking together again, for we have of late been silent. The last year's battle commenced at this time a year ago, and it is natural the men should recall it. Had I succeeded in pushing my party across the bay, our success would have been unequalled; it was the true plan, the best-conceived, and in fact the only one by which, after the death of my dogs, I could hope to carry on the search. The temperatures were frightful, — 40° to — 56° ; but my experience of last year on the rescue-party, where we travelled eighty miles in sixty odd hours, almost without a halt, yet without a frost-bite, shows that such temperatures are no obstacle to travel, provided you have the necessary practical knowledge of the equipment and conduct of your party. I firmly believe that no natural cold as yet known can arrest travel. The whole story of this winter illustrates it. I have both sledged and walked sixty and seventy miles over the roughest ice, in repeated journeys, at fifty degrees below zero, and the two parties from the south reached our brig in the dead of winter, after being exposed for three hundred miles to the same horrible cold.
"The day has been beautifully clear, and so mild that our mid-day thermometers gave but 7°. This bears badly upon the desertion of Godfrey, for the probabilities are that he will find Hans's buffalo-robe at the hut, and thus sleep and be refreshed. In that case, he can easily reach the Esquimaux of Etah Bay, and may as easily seize upon the sledge-dogs, rifle, and trading-articles. The consequences of such an act would be very disastrous; nearly all my hopes of lifting the sick, and therefore of escaping in boats to the south, rest upon these dogs. By them only can we hunt bear and early seal, or rapidly transport ourselves to the tide-holes (polynia) of the spring, where we can add water-fowl to our game-list. I am entirely without a remedy. We cannot pursue him, nor could we have well prevented his escape; it is the most culpable desertion I ever knew or heard of. Bonsall, Petersen, and myself are the only men now on board who can work for the rest. Save the warnings of a secret trouble, the fox gnawing under the jacket, I do better than the rest; but I bear my fox. Bonsall is evidently more disabled.
"March 22, Thursday. — Petersen's ptarmigan are all gone, (five of them), and of the rabbit but two rations of eight ounces each remain. We three, Bonsall, Petersen, and myself, have made up our minds to walk up Mary River Ravine until we reach the deer-plains, and there separate and close in upon them. To-day is therefore a busy one, for we must prepare beforehand the entire daily requirements of the sick: the ice for melting water must be cut in blocks and laid near the stove; the wood, of which it requires one entire day to tear enough out for two days, must be chopped and piled within arm-reach; the bread must be cooked and the provisions arranged, before we can leave our comrades. When we three leave the brig, there will not be a single able man on board. McGary is able to leave his bed and stump about a little; but this is all. Need the dear home-folks, who may some day read this, wonder that I am a little careworn, and that I leave the brig with reluctance? Of we three God-supported men, each has his own heavy load of scurvy.
"March 23, Friday. — ^We started this morning, over-worked and limping, rather as men ending a journey than beginning one. After four hours of forced walking, we reached the reindeer feeding-grounds, but were too late: the animals had left at least two hours before our arrival. An extensive rolling country, rather a lacustrine plain than a true plateau, was covered with traces of life. The snow had been turned up in patches of four or five yards in diameter, by the hoofs of the reindeer, over areas of twenty or fifty acres. The extensive levels were studded with them; and wherever we examined the ground-surface it was covered with grasses and destitute of lichens. We scouted it over the protruding syenites, and found a couple of ptarmigan and three hares: these we secured.
"Our little party reached the brig in the evening, after a walk over a heavy snow-lined country of thirty miles. Nevertheless, I had a walk full of instructive material. The frozen channel of Mary River abounds in noble sections and scenes of splendid wildness and desolation. I am too tired to epitomize here my note-book's record; but I may say that the opportunity which I had to-day of comparing the terrace and boulder lines of Mary River and Charlotte Wood Fiord enables me to assert positively the interesting fact of a secular elevation of the crust, commencing at some as yet undetermined point north of 76°, and continuing to the Great Glacier and the high northern latitudes of Grinnell Land. This elevation, as connected with the equally well-sustained depression of the Greenland coast south of Kingatok, is in interesting keeping with the same undulating alternation on the Scandinavian side. Certainly there seems to be in the localities of these elevated and depressed areas a systematic compensation.
"I counted to-day forty-one distinct ledges or shelves of terrace embraced between our water-line and the syenitic ridges through which Mary River forces itself. These shelves, though sometimes merged into each other, presented distinct and recognisable embankments or escarps of elevation. Their surfaces were at a nearly uniform inclination of descent of 5°, and their breadth either twelve, twenty-four, thirty-six, or some other multiple of twelve paces. This imposing series of ledges carried you in forty-one gigantic steps to an elevation of four hundred and eighty feet; and, as the first rudiments of these ancient beaches left the granites which had once formed the barrier sea-coast, you could trace them passing from drift-strewn rocky barricades to cleanly-defined and gracefully-curved shelves of shingle and pebbles. I have studies of these terraced beaches at various points on the northern coast of Greenland. They are more imposing and on a larger scale than those of Wellington Channel, which are now regarded by geologists as indicative of secular uplift of coast. As these strange structures wound in long spirals around the headlands of the fiords, they reminded me of the parallel roads of Glen Roy, — a comparison which I make rather from general resemblance than ascertained analogies of causes.