The “Discovery” had passed a winter little, if at all, less severe than ours, but in one respect she had been more fortunate. No less than thirty-three musk oxen were secured in the autumn, and thus a supply of good fresh meat was issued twice a-week during the winter. Her routine and amusements were almost identical with our own, but we heard with surprise of her skating rink, and of dramas performed in a snow-built theatre on shore, where a temperature many degrees below zero obliged the actors to appear muffled to several times the size of ordinary stage heroes. After a short rest, our dog-sledge returned to the “Alert,” and reached her just a day too late to give the western and northern parties news from the “Discovery.” She was then at once despatched to pioneer a “high-road” to Greenland across the narrowest part of the channel in advance of the “Discovery’s” detachment. From this time the arrival and departure of sledge-crews was a matter of daily occurrence. Numerous supporting sledges, now travelling invariably in the hours called night, arrived from Greenland or Cape Joseph Henry, filled up with stores, and left again, each fully occupied with its own work, and only catching an occasional glimpse of what the others were doing. It was while all were thus actively employed that sickness—the one sickness of the Arctic regions—appeared amongst us. No one with medical experience of the disease can read the sledge journals of former expeditions without recognising numerous indications of scurvy. Our parties, more than five hundred miles north of where Franklin was lost, and in an unexpectedly colder and more lifeless climate, had no greater safeguards than their predecessors. Accordingly, each sledge-crew that returned to the ship showed fresh examples of the exhaustion, swollen and sprained ankles, stiff knees, and bruised and painful legs, only too familiar to Arctic travellers. Petersen, already maimed by frost-bite, was its first victim. He died on 14th May, and on the 19th the few remaining on board carried him to his grave. A spot on the top of a small hill, half-way between the beach and the beacon on Cairn Hill, was chosen, because a long heavy slab, suitable for a tombstone, lay there. The ground was frozen as hard as rock, and it took three days’ hard work with pick and gunpowder to dig a grave three feet deep. The slab, afterwards rough-hewn by his messmates, and an oaken tablet covered with brass, marks where he lies. [Illustration: PETERSEN’S GRAVE.]