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circumstance which Knight mentions frequently. He seems to have continued to
consider it almost too good to be true, for it differed so much from his previous
arctic experience.

Before they sailed north we had frequently discussed the plans for
the winter. It had been the experience of our various expeditions and it has been
the general experience of polar explorers that when a number of men lie idle in
camp waiting for winter to pass, there is tedium, quarreling and even general
decline in health. No matter how good the cooking or varied the diet, the men
get tired of their food; and no matter how congenial they may be ordinarily, they
also become tired of each other. Some explorers, even in recent years, have
considered it necessary to keep the men in camp during midwinter, thinking the
storms, darkness and low temperature too disagreeable to be faced. But through
his experience of the methods used by our expeditions, Knight looked upon the
midwinter as second only to the early spring as a period of travel and other
activity. Maurer had had experience of being confined in a ship both when he was
on an arctic whaler and later when on our ship, the Karluk, and he was equally
of the view that every man should be outdoors, occupied in some interesting and
profitable way every day of the winter except when a special gale was blowing.
On this basis we had agreed before they sailed north that the party should
establish at least two camps about ten or fifteen miles apart. They themselves
had advanced the plan of having four camps, each with one man, but I had suggested
they start with two men in each of two camps and then change partners occasionally.
If that did not work, they would establish more camps. For daily activity they
had the hunting and the trapping of foxes. In the Arctic an Eskimo who hunts
and traps for a living ordinarily leaves his family in the morning and returns
to it at night. But the white trapper will have "a line of cabins”, sometimes
as many as seven or eight houses ten to fifteen miles apart. If this is in the
interior of some land, the houses are arranged in a great circle; but if it is