The Portland daily press., 1892-09-13

Christian Maigaard, Assistant Governor
of Rittenbeck. They had sledging
equipment consisting of nine-foot sledges
small jacketed alcohol stoves, nine foot
double-ended, ash alpenstocks with steel,
point and chisel, rubber ice creepers.
snow shoes and skier, or snow skates
For provisions they took tea, sugar, con-
densed milk, hard bread, pemmican
dried meat pounded and mixed with fat
and sometimes with fruit, and COM
pressed into cakes) cranberry jam, baked
beans, Liebig extract and an experiment
tai mixture of meat, biscuit and dessicated
potatoes put up in cans. Their clothing
was not quite what it should have been,
as they had been misled as to the severity
of the cold. They had fur sleeping bags
however, which enabled them to roll
themselves up and go to sleep on the ice
field.
The ice field, where it's edges reach the
salt water on the coast, is fringed with
glaciers. To reach the plain it is neces-
sary to scale these glaciers, and this
Peary and his companion found one of
the hardest tasks OF the trip. The. as
cent was steep, slippery and interrupted
by frequent glacial streams. Once upon
the ice field Tor Size blink as they call
it in those lands), they found the surface
consisting in general Of rolling hummocks
extending nearly north and south, high
est and steepest on their western slopes
which ranged from 100 feet to $50 feet
high. The western faces of the hum
mocks were grooyed and crevassed, and
studded with huge, shark-tooth pima
cles. In detail the surface was, as rule
roughly granular in texture, affording
firm, sure footing, interrupted here and
there by crevasses, some open and some
covered with snow arch by patches of
soft, deep snow in the depressions be-
teen the hummocks, and by patches of
hard ice cut by nearly parallel burrows
as if made by huge plow, This is the
description which Lieutenant Peary gives
/ of the appearance of the ice field.
They found it best to travel in the
night and rest by day. The heavy winds
that blow across the
Waste of Snow
were much severer by day than by night
Then Arctic travellers have found that
the excessive brilliancy of the reflection
of the sun on the snow fields brings on
snow blindness. This alone compelled
the explorer Parry, in his expedition
northward over the floating ice from
Spitzbergen, to give up all travel by day.
But the sweep of the wind seems to have
determined Peary to travel by night.
Speaking of this wind, Peary says, 1.-THE
fierce east wind made the temperature
of ten degrees ALMOST unbearable. Every
bit of metal stuck to your fingers or lips,
and boiling tea is cold almost before we
could get it to our mouths. A can of
beans, which with tea formed our supper
had to be chopped in halves with the
Ratchet and it's contents extracted and
eaten with the same implement"
After travelling all night they would
lie down to sleep by day. At first they
tried to sleep by simply lying down on
the ice field in their sleeping bags of dog
skin; but the glare of light would be SO
brilliant that they could not sleep. So
after that they would build a little rec
tangle of snow, and stretching rubber
blanket over it would go to sleep in this
improvised hut. Sometimes the snow
would be too hard for this, and they
would stretch blanket over the sledges
and go to sleep on the lee side of them.
When severe snow storm was raging
it was not always pleasant. Peary has
described the days camping after a
weary all night tramp against a steady
southeast gale, laden with snow. 'sToo
tired and sleepy from our struggle with
the storm to build a house," he says 1--WE
turned in behind our sledges and imme-
diately went to sleep. When I awoke
we were
Completely Showed Under
and here we lay for IS hours, with the
wind and snow driving in one incessant,
sullen roar across the drifts above us:
crawling out but once to make some tea
and get the cramp out of our limbs.
This proceeding we both regretted, as
the fine snow was driven into every fibre
of our clothes, and when we crawled
down into our dens again it melted, turn
ing our comparative comfort into cold,
| wet misery. Sunday morning we crawled
out during lull in the storm, and dug
a shallow pit, covered it with a rubber
blanket, eXcavated our sledges and bags,
placed the sledges an the blanket, threw
our bags underneath and crawled after
them. A pint of hot tea each and a
square meal, made us feel as if we were
| the proprietors of palace, and though
| the storm ragged "a hours longer, we
were comparatively comfortable
Some of the night marches were mar
velously interesting. Speaking of one
night, Peary says: "a peculiar phenom-
enon noticed during this march was the
apparent sinking of large areas of snow
at intervals as we passed along, accom-
panied by peculiar muffled reports which
| rumbled away beneath the crust in every
direction, until they died away; just as ii
happens when one is skating upon a
freshly frozen lake in early winter.
| The sky above was flawless blue, the
crimson sun in one direction, the yellow