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starting as much food on the sleds as we could possibly take with us.
Once broken into the meat diet these men were all good and if we could
have retained them throughout the expedition the later sled trips might
have been different in outfit, and I am sure the results would have been
better; but, as we were continually breaking in new men, we had to start
out from our headquarters each time with the same kind of food that
previous Arctic explorers had carried and rely upon teaching our men our
method of living off the country gradually. Always when the men re-
turned from the trips they were enthusiastic about the life they had
lived and the meat diet. They got to like the kind of meat and they
said they had never felt better in their lives.

PREPARING FOR OUR SPRING WORK

What had been the rule for previous years was also to be the rulw
the winter of 1917 and 1918. A couple of our men were willing enough
to start living on meat right away, but the majority, including of course
the new men that were engaged the summer of 1917, said that the meat diet
might be all right and, while they had no objection to living it when the
time came, they wanted as much other food taken along as possible. Al-
though we knew it to be a waste of energy to haul sleds loaded with
rations, we had to do it in order to make our men feel safe and to satisfy
their individual food prejudices which depended on the variety of food
they had been used to - the less the variety they had been used to the
greater the prejudice against trying anything new.

In January the preparations for the spring exploratory work of 1918
were progressing well under the direction of Captain Hadley and it now
looked as though we could easily leave headquarters for Cross Island, the
starting point we had chosen for the ice journey, at the time we had
first planned - February 1, 1918. In journeys such as we planned it is