Our freedom of movement and ability to leave the shelter of the land and cross and recross the channel at will through the heaviest ice, was also gratifying to me. In the voyage from New York to Etah we had passed the latitudes of the most northern extremities of North America, Europe and Asia. Since leaving Etah, we had passed the latitudes of the most northern extremities of Spitzbergen and Franz Joseph Land, and now only the northern points of the two most northern lands in the world, Cape Morris Jesup and Cape Columbia, lay a little beyond us. The northern-reaching fingers of all the rest of the great world lay far behind us below the ice-bound southern horizon. We were deep in that gaunt frozen border land which lies between God’s countries and inter-stellar space. CHAPTER III AUTUMN AT CAPE SHERIDAN It was hoped that the next ebb-tide would give us an opportunity to advance farther, and immediately after breakfast I hurried ashore to examine the ice beyond Cape Sheridan and visit the cairn built by the _Alert_ thirty years before. The weather was too thick to permit any satisfactory reconnoissance. I took the _Alert’s_ record from the cairn, a copy of which Marvin later replaced together with an additional brief memorandum. All the slopes of the land were white with snow above which the cairn, and the lonely grave of Petersen, Danish interpreter of the English expedition, stood out in sombre silhouette. The _Roosevelt_ was moored close by a ledge of rocks where, in 1902, I had deposited a small cache for my return.