The whaleboat and the number two cutter were the only boats now left to the expedition.  The third boat had been abandoned long before they had reached open water.

An hour later Adler, the sailing-master, who had been bailing, and who sat facing Bennett, looked back through the storm; then, turning to Bennett, said: 

“Beg pardon, sir, I think they are signalling us.”

Bennett did not answer, but, with his hand gripping the tiller, kept his face to the front, his glance alternating between the heaving prow of the boat and the huge gray billows hissing with froth careering rapidly alongside.  To pause for a moment, to vary by ever so little from the course of the storm, might mean the drowning of them all.  After a few moments Adler spoke again, touching his cap.

“I’m sure I see a signal, sir.”

“No, you don’t,” answered Bennett.

“Beg pardon, I’m quite sure I do.”

Bennett leaned toward him, the cast in his eyes twinkling with a wicked light, the furrow between the eyebrows deepening.  “I tell you, you don’t see any signal; do you understand?  You don’t see any signal until I choose to have you.”

The night was bitter hard for the occupants of the whaleboat.  In their weakened condition they were in no shape to fight a polar hurricane in an open boat.

For three weeks they had not known the meaning of full rations.  During the first days after the line of march over the ice had been abruptly changed to the west in the hope of reaching open water, only three-quarter rations had been issued, and now for the last two days half rations had been their portion.  The gnawing of hunger had begun.  Every man was perceptibly weaker.  Matters were getting desperate.

But by seven o’clock the next morning the storm had blown itself out.  To Bennett’s inexpressible relief the cutter hove in view.  Shaping their course to landward once more, the boats kept company, and by the middle of the afternoon Bennett and the crew of the whaleboat successfully landed upon a bleak, desolate, and wind-scourged coast.  But in some way, never afterward sufficiently explained, the cutter under Ferriss’s command was crushed in the floating ice within one hundred yards of the shore.  The men and stores were landed—­the water being shallow enough for wading—­but the boat was a hopeless wreck.

“I believe it’s Cape Shelaski,” said Bennett to Ferriss when camp had been made and their maps consulted.  “But if it is, it’s charted thirty-five minutes too far to the west.”

Before breaking camp the next morning Bennett left this record under a cairn of rocks upon the highest point of the cape, further marking the spot by one of the boat’s flags: