Our route on the following night was nearly straight in a N.N.E.
direction. The snow was very soft and deep in many places. A few hundred
yards from the beach there were steep banks covered with shingle and
small boulders of granite, where we usually found the snow less deep,
and walking consequently better. After travelling nine miles we came to
a considerable creek, about twenty yards wide, in which a deep channel
had been worn among the mud and shingle. Near it there were numerous
Esquimaux marks set up, and circular tent sites, but all of old date. We
continued our march twelve miles further, and at 8 A.M. arrived at
another creek somewhat larger than the last, and with higher banks. Here
there were also many Esquimaux marks, and I afterwards learned that some
parties had resorted hither from Repulse Bay, for the purpose of
catching salmon, trout, &c. About an hour before reaching this place we
crossed a long and curiously shaped point, which I named Point Hamilton
after a near relative. The bay formed by it was called Erlandson.
One of the men, although an able active fellow, not being used to this
sort of exercise, was much fatigued; and as the weather looked
threatening, I ordered our snow-house to be built--the more readily as
there was fuel to be found. In little more than a hour and a half we
were comfortably housed, and not long afterwards we had taken our usual
morning meal of pemmican seasoned with a handful of flour, those
forming, when boiled together, a very nourishing and not unpalatable
dish. The temperature all night had been 22° above zero, being too warm
for walking pleasantly; and the men, having had to exert themselves
much, were glad to get to rest as soon as possible, whilst I remained up
to obtain a meridian observation of the sun. This gave latitude 67° 58'
49" N. Our longitude by account was 85° 59' 36" W. The sun was too much
obscured by clouds to obtain the variation. We here deposited some
pemmican and a little flour for our return journey.
When we started at 8 h. 30 m. P.M. on the 19th it blew a gale of wind
from S.S.E. with much drift and snow, the temperature being only 4°
below the freezing point. Fortunately the wind was on our backs; but the
drift was so thick that we were obliged to follow every turn of the
coast, and we could not see more than twenty yards before us. When we
had travelled six miles we came to a bay a mile and a half wide, on the
north shore of which there were two strangely shaped rocks of granite,
having the appearance of an old ruin or portion of a fortress. They
were of a square form, each about twenty-five feet high and nearly as
much in extent.
Our course now lay due north; but we had not gone more than twelve miles
altogether, when the weather became so unpleasant that we were glad to
get under shelter, and before we did so, every part of our clothes was
penetrated with snow drift. We could obtain no fuel here.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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