How inscrutable and imperative are the ways of fate!  Looking backward now on the pitiful story of the Greely party, we see that the second relief expedition, intended to succor and to rescue these gallant men, was in fact the cause of their overwhelming disaster—­and this not wholly because of errors committed in its direction, though they were many.  When Greely abandoned the station at Fort Conger, he could have pressed straight to the southward without halt, and perhaps escaped with all his party—­he could, indeed, have started earlier in the summer, and made escape for all certain.  But he relied on the relief expedition, and held his ground until the last possible moment.  Even after reaching Cape Sabine he might have taken to the boats and made his way southward to safety, for he says himself that open water was in sight; but the cheering news brought by Rice of a supply of provisions, and the promise left by Garlington, that all that men could do would be done for his rescue, led him to halt his journey at Cape Sabine, and go into winter quarters in the firm conviction that already another vessel was on the way to aid him.  He did not know that Garlington had left but few provisions out of his great store, that the “Yantic” had fled without landing an ounce of food, and that the authorities at Washington had concluded that nothing more could be done that season—­although whalers frequently entered the waters where Greely lay trapped, at a later date than that which saw the “Yantic’s” precipitate retreat.  Had he known these things, he says himself, “I should certainly have turned my back to Cape Sabine and starvation, to face a possible death on the perilous voyage along shore to the southward.”

But not knowing them, he built a hut, and prepared to face the winter.  It is worth noting, as evidence that Arctic hardships themselves, when not accompanied by a lack of food, are not unbearable, that at this time, after two years in the region of perpetual ice, the whole twenty-five men were well, and even cheerful.  Depression and death came only when the food gave out.

The permanent camp, which for many of the party was to be a tomb, was fixed a few miles from Cape Sabine, by the side of a pool of fresh water—­frozen, of course.  Here a hut was built with stone walls three feet high, rafters made of oars with the blades cut off, and a canvas roof, except in the center, where an upturned whaleboat made a sort of a dome.  Only under the whaleboat could a man get on his knees and hold himself erect; elsewhere the heads of the tall men touched the roof when they sat up in their sleeping bags on the dirt floor.  With twenty-five men in sleeping bags, which they seldom left, two in each bag, packed around the sides of the hut, a stove fed with stearine burning in the center for the cooking of the insufficient food to which they were reduced, and all air from without excluded, the hut became a place as much of torture as of refuge.