e
sort of work that now lay before the expedition and which the expedition
eventually performed, if an effort is made to make him understand
exactly what it means to travel nearly a thousand miles with dog sledges
over the ice of the polar pack. In that belief, I shall at this point
endeavor to describe as briefly as is consistent with clearness the
conditions that confronted us and the means and methods by which those
conditions were met.

Between the winter quarters of the _Roosevelt_ at Cape Sheridan, and
Cape Columbia, the most northerly point on the north coast of Grant
Land, which I had chosen as the point of departure for the ice journey,
lay ninety miles in a northwesterly direction along the ice-foot and
across the land, which we must traverse before plunging onto the
trackless ice fields of the Arctic Ocean.

From Cape Columbia we were to go straight north over the ice of the
Polar Sea,--four hundred and thirteen geographical miles. Many persons
whose memories go back to the smooth skating ponds of their childhood,
picture the Arctic Ocean as a gigantic skating pond with a level floor
over which the dogs drag us merrily--we sitting comfortably upon the
sledges with hot bricks to keep our toes and fingers warm. Such ideas
are distinctly different from the truth, as will appear.

There is no land between Cape Columbia and the North Pole and no smooth
and very little level ice.

For a few miles only after leaving the land we had level going, as for
those few miles we were on the "glacial fringe." This fringe, which
fills all the bays and extends across the whole width of North Grant
Land, is really an exaggerated ice-foot; in some places it is miles in
width. While the outer edge in places is afloat and rises and falls with
the movement of the tides, it never moves as a body, except where great
fields of ice break off from it and float away upon the waters of the
Arctic Ocean.

Beyond the glacial fringe is the indescribable surface of the shore
lead, or tidal crack--that zone of unceasing conflict between the heavy
floating ice and the stationary glacial fringe. This shore lead is
constantly opening and shutting; opening when there are offshore winds,
or spring ebb-tides, crushing shut when there are northerly winds or
spring flood-tides. Here the ice is smashed into fragments of all sizes
and piled up into great pressure ridges parallel with the shore.

The ice is smashed into these pressure ridges by the