GOLDNER'S PATENT,
a narrow-bladed axe, several broken porter and wine bottles stamped
BRISTOL GLASS-WORKS.
and a few barrel staves. The cache was one evidently made by Netchillik
Inuits, who had found the things along the coast. In fact, one of those
we had interviewed mentioned having cached just such articles somewhere
along the coast, and had afterward forgotten the place. This is worthy
of consideration, as indicating that our search was sufficiently
comprehensive to have discovered anything that had been cached away by
the crews of the ships between Cape Felix and Collinson Inlet within
five or six miles of the coast.
The following day Lieutenant Schwatka and I took Toolooah with us
inland, and sent Frank and Henry down the coast toward Victory Point.
From the top of a high hill, about six miles south-east from camp, we
had an uninterrupted view for many miles in every direction, and swept
the entire field with a spy-glass--but saw nothing like a cache or
cairn. It was all a barren waste, with many ponds and lakes, some still
covered with ice, and others, being more shallow, were entirely clear,
as was the case with most of those near the coast. A few patches of
snow could be seen here and there on the hill-sides. We had to cross
one deep snowbank before reaching the crest of the hill, and upon our
descent came upon a depression in the snow, which Toolooah recognized
as a bear's igloo. A few patches of white wool near the entrance
confirmed his opinion. I crawled in as far as I could, to see in what
sort of a house the polar bear hibernated, and found it very much in
size and shape like those of the Inuits. The only difference, as far as
I could see, was that this was dug out of a snowbank, instead of being
built upon the surface and afterward buried by the drift.
The country over which we travelled this day was like all the rest we
had seen in King William Land--broken and jagged clay stone, with
intervening marshes. Little patches of brown and green moss, covered
with delicate purple flowerets, peep up occasionally from among the
piles of dry stones, though there is apparently no vestige of earth or
mould to sustain their delicate lives. These flowers appear as soon as
the snow melts from off the moss, and are most welcome to the eye of
the traveller in this desolate country. How glad we will be to see the
grass and trees of the temperate zone once more, after living so long
in this void! To-day, for the first, time I saw a few delicate little
daisies, and the sight of them carried me in imagination to the woods
and fields of New Jersey. I forgot the salt marshes and red "Jersey
mud;" but even the marshes there would look like flower-gardens after
the clay-stone deserts of King William Land.
[Illustration: CURIOUS FORMATION OF CLAY-STONE.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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