Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/511

 of water you called ‘leads.’ I should not have liked to depend upon chipping off cakes of ice and zigzagging them across. A man on the far side of a lead might be in a confounded trap.”

A smile crept slowly over his face.

“The danger is not so great. Generally they are not very wide. They freeze over. The effort to reach the Pole was made at the lowest temperature when this danger is the least. On one occasion, however, I realized what it meant. We came to a lead two miles wide. I thought out the situation and concluded to wait until it should be frozen over and we waited three days. Then my Esquimaux reported a crossing two or three miles away. We went over on snowshoes fifty paces apart and singly, but it was very dangerous and I feared we should never reach home to tell the tale.”

“Would it not be possible to take some light kind of a canoe along?”

“No, the only hope of success lay in transporting as little as possible. We had to run the risks.”

To another query put by Mr. Lloyd C. Griscom, he said in reply:

“We lived altogether upon compressed foods. No coffee was permitted. Under the excitement of the advance, coffee would have resulted in loss of sleep and that would have meant loss of vital force. We needed it all. The ration was a quart of tea, morning and evening, but no coffee. Coffee is a drink for the tropics but not for the poles. We would not have a movement of the bowels for perhaps a week. There was no trouble to keep comfortably warm in a temperature of sixty degrees below zero. It was essential not to permit enough exertion to cause perspiration. That also meant a loss of force.”

He, himself, made a reference to Cook.

“Commander,” said I, “I had no confidence in Cook from the time of his initial telegram, which did not say he Rh