ice. The principal
amusement of the new members was in trying to acquire from the Eskimos
on board a smattering of their language. As interpreter, they had Matt
Henson. Sometimes, looking down from the bridge of the ship onto the
main deck, I would see one of these new men surrounded by a group of
Eskimos, gesticulating and laughing, and I knew that a language lesson
was in progress. The women were delighted at the opportunity to teach
Borup the Eskimo words for jacket, hood, boots, sky, water, food, et
cetera, as they seemed to be of the opinion that he was a fine boy.

The _Roosevelt_ lay quietly in open water all night on the 24th of
August, but in the forenoon of the 25th steamed northward nearly to Cape
Union. Beyond there the ice was densely packed. I climbed up into the
rigging to take a look but, finding no suitable shelter, decided to turn
back to Lincoln Bay, where we made the ship fast between two grounded
ice floes. The day before had been calm and sunny, but the 25th was
snowy and disagreeable, with a raw northerly wind. The snow was driving
in horizontal sheets across the decks, the water was black as ink, the
ice a spectral white, and the coast near us looked like the shores of
the land of ghosts. One of our berg pieces was carried away by the flood
tide, and we were obliged to shift our position to the inner side of the
other one; but there were other grounded bergs outside us to take the
impact of the larger floes.

On general principles, I landed a cache of supplies at this point on the
following day. The possibility of losing the ship was always present;
but if everything went well the cache could be made use of in the
hunting season. The supplies, in their wooden boxes, were simply piled
upon the shore. Wandering arctic hares, reindeer, and musk-oxen never
attempt to regale themselves on tin cans or wooden boxes.

I went ashore and walked over to Shelter River, living over again the
experiences there in 1906, when, during my absence at Cape Thomas
Hubbard, Captain Bartlett--for he was then, as now, the master of the
_Roosevelt_--had tried to drive the ship south from her exposed position
at Cape Sheridan to a more sheltered place in Lincoln Bay, where I was
to rejoin them.

At Shelter River, the _Roosevelt_ had been caught between the moving
pack and the vertical face of the ice-foot, receiving almost a fatal
blow. She had been lifted bodily out of the water, the stern-post and
rudder smashed in