We had with us thirty-two dogs, three sledges, three kayaks, human provisions for 112 days, and dog provisions for 40.  Being now about 340 miles from the Pole, we hoped to reach it in 43 days, then, turning south, and feeding living dogs with dead, make either Franz Josef Land or Spitzbergen, at which latter place we should very likely come up with a whaler.

Well, during the first days, progress was very slow, the ice being rough and laney, and the dogs behaving most badly, stopping dead at every difficulty, and leaping over the traces.  Clark had had the excellent idea of attaching a gold-beater’s-skin balloon, with a lifting power of 35 pounds, to each sledge, and we had with us a supply of zinc and sulphuric-acid to repair the hydrogen-waste from the bags; but on the third day Mew over-filled and burst his balloon, and I and Clark had to cut ours loose in order to equalise weights, for we could neither leave him behind, turn back to the ship, nor mend the bag.  So it happened that at the end of the fourth day out, we had made only nineteen miles, and could still from a hummock discern afar the leaning masts of the old Boreal.  Clark led on ski, captaining a sledge with 400 lbs. of instruments, ammunition, pemmican, aleuronate bread; Mew followed, his sledge containing provisions only; and last came I, with a mixed freight.  But on the third day Clark had an attack of snow-blindness, and Mew took his place.

Pretty soon our sufferings commenced, and they were bitter enough.  The sun, though constantly visible day and night, gave no heat.  Our sleeping-bags (Clark and Mew slept together in one, I in another) were soaking wet all the night, being thawed by our warmth; and our fingers, under wrappings of senne-grass and wolf-skin, were always bleeding.  Sometimes our frail bamboo-cane kayaks, lying across the sledges, would crash perilously against an ice-ridge—­and they were our one hope of reaching land.  But the dogs were the great difficulty:  we lost six mortal hours a day in harnessing and tending them.  On the twelfth day Clark took a single-altitude observation, and found that we were only in latitude 86 deg. 45’; but the next day we passed beyond the furthest point yet reached by man, viz. 86 deg. 53’, attained by the Nix explorers four years previously.

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Our one secret thought now was food, food—­our day-long lust for the eating-time.  Mew suffered from ’Arctic thirst.

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Under these conditions, man becomes in a few days, not a savage only, but a mere beast, hardly a grade above the bear and walrus.  Ah, the ice!  A long and sordid nightmare was that, God knows.

On we pressed, crawling our little way across the Vast, upon whose hoar silence, from Eternity until then, Bootes only, and that Great Bear, had watched.

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After the eleventh day our rate of march improved:  all lanes disappeared, and ridges became much less frequent.  By the fifteenth day I was leaving behind the ice-grave of David Wilson at the rate of ten to thirteen miles a day.