When the tide turned on the ebb the ship settled down again considerably but never floated freely again until the following summer. Anticipating further pressure with following tides, and to provide against the contingency of the ship being rendered untenable, the work of putting some coal and all supplies and equipment ashore was commenced at once and prosecuted without interruption by the officers, crew, and Eskimo men, women, and children, for some thirty-six hours. Planks were put from the rail to the ice-foot on the port bow, quarter and amidships, and the boxes of provisions slid down these, when men took them and put them back from the edge of the ice-foot, where the women loaded them upon sledges and pushed them beyond any danger of loss by disruption of the ice-foot itself. This work was greatly expedited from the fact that practically all the supplies had been taken out of the holds during the previous days and were lying on deck. While the work was in progress one of the Eskimos of my southwest scouting party came in on foot reporting twenty-one musk-oxen killed in Porter Bay. The next night there was a brief and not serious pressure, then the ice about the ship quieted down again, though it ran strongly with the tides some fifty yards outside of us. Of course this occurrence put all ideas of any farther advance out of question, and the usual routine fall work of an Arctic expedition and preparation for wintering were inaugurated. Hunting parties of the Eskimos were kept constantly in the field, covering the country north to Clements Markham Inlet and south to Wrangel Bay and Lake Hazen. The results of these parties were satisfactory, considerable numbers of musk-oxen and reindeer being secured. Almost every day one or two hunters went out from the ship and in this way some hundred or more hare were secured in the immediate vicinity. But musk-oxen were to be our mainstay, and while my confidence that we should find numbers of these animals within a comparatively short distance of the ship was justified by events I still recognised that our main source of supply must be the drainage basin of Lake Hazen, the northern portion of which, covering the southern slopes of the United States Range, had not been drawn upon by me while at Fort Conger between 1899 and 1902. This region was now tapped with great success by parties travelling directly overland from the ship to Lake Hazen.