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Updated: May 7, 2025
All of the Esquimos want to come aboard and stay aboard. Some we want and will take along, but there are others we will not have or take along on a bet, and the pleasant duty of telling them so and putting them ashore falls to me. It is not a pleasant job to disappoint these people, but they would be a burden to us and in our way.
We were six: Peary, the commander, the Esquimos, Ootah, Egingwah, Seegloo and Ooqueah, and myself. Day and night were the same. My thoughts were on the going and getting forward, and on nothing else. The wind was from the southeast, and seemed to push us on, and the sun was at our backs, a ball of livid fire, rolling his way above the horizon in never-ending day.
Among the men of this tribe, quarrels and fights very rarely occur; but it is a very noticeable fact that while the men of the tribe do not make war on each other, the man of the family will, at the least provocation on the part of his better-half, without hesitation apply brute force to show his authority. The tribe of these, the North Greenland Esquimos, numbers two hundred and eighteen.
The dogs have been landed on a small island in the bay, where they are safe and cannot run away, and they can have a glorious time, fighting and getting acquainted with each other. Some of the Esquimos' goods are ashore, some aboard the Erik, and the rest forward on the roof of the deck-house, while the Roosevelt is getting her coal aboard.
We turned the igloos over to Marvin and his Esquimos, who were to await the arrival of the Commander, and Captain Bartlett and myself got our parties under way. Conditions are never similar, no two days are the same; and our going this day was nothing like the paradise of the day before. At a little distance from the igloos we encountered high masses of heavily-rubbled, old ice.
Cape York was reached on the morning of August 25, and from the two Esquimo families, living at the extreme point of the Cape, we obtained the mail which had been left there by Captain Adams of the Dundee Whaling Fleet Morning Star. Our letters, although they bore no more recent a date than that of March 23, 1909, were eagerly read. At Cape York we landed the last of the Esquimos.
Here they were, fat, smiling, and healthy; and I apprehend somewhat surprised to see us, but they bluffed it out well. Murphy and the young man Pritchard were also here. Murphy and Pritchard were the members of the crew who had been left here to guard the provisions of the expedition, and to trade with the Esquimos.
Some of these were not inhabited; others had Indians or Esquimos on them, but, after the manner of the early discoverers, Bering took possession of them all in the name of the Emperor of Russia. It doesn't seem right as we look at things now, but in those days 'might made right, and it was just the same way the English did when they came to America.
Captain Bartlett was forward, astraddle of the bow with the boat-hook in his hands to fend off the blocks of ice, and knew perfectly well where he wanted to land, but the group of excited Esquimos were in his way and though he ordered them back, they continued running about and getting in his way.
There is little use for money up here, and the place is seldom visited except by men from the whalers, when their ships are locked in by ice. From here it is two hundred miles due north to Cape York. August 1: Arrived at Cape York Bay and went ashore with the party to communicate with the Esquimos of whom there were three families.
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