A Diary and Journal from the Second Grinnell Expedition

[verso]

search. This journal will give in due time my list of equipment and general organization.

My feelings may be understood when I say that my Carpenter and all the working men save Bonsall are still on their backs and that a [months?] preliminary labour is needed before I can commence the heavy labour of transporting my boats (three in number) over the ice to the anticipated water. At the moment of my writing this the water is over eighty miles in a short line progress from our brig!

[No matter, spirits good! Hope is better! Trust best of all!!]

Thursday Apr. 12

Again blowing as yesterday from [?] We have had of late much of these winds. I regard them as very favourable to the advance of open water. The long swell from the open spaces in North Baffin’s Bay [succeeded] has a powerful effect upon the ice. I should not wonder if the ice about Life Boat Cove, off McGeary Is would be broken up by the first of May. Poor Hans is out in this storm.

Our sick have been without fresh food since the 8th but such is the [?] by our late supply that they, as yet, show no backward symptoms. McGeary and [Christian Ohlsen|Ohlsen] and Brooks and Riley dress themselves daily and are able to do much useful jobbing. Thomas begins to relieve me in cooking, [George Riley|Riley]] to take a spell at the [?] Morton cooked breakfast, am aided by McGeary, [Christian Ohlsen|Ohlsen] has already finished one cotton [?] camp blanket with which I intend to cover our last remaining buffalo skins. Wilson comes on slowly. Dr. Hayes too begins to heal. Sonntag is more cheery [less a nuissance] with the [encaptions?] of Goodfellow John & Whipple I can feel that my little household is [are] fast becoming men again. [Sastrande indefinite?]

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[the following paragraph is crossed out] and vague as is the acknowledged God to whom I give it. Gratitude unspeakable pervaded one at this sudden change. I knew the cause of our resurrection from putrid stagnation to vitality. The cause was 400 [?] of raw meat, it puzzled the [?] and [?] to say why in the next causative [?], raw walrus did this. I might spend a lifetime among the proximates and never get up to God. What damned [me?] - family - for us [agglomented?[ worms, unable [?] [?] to dissect our own Maggots[?], to travel up to [origination?]. I only know that I am very grateful. [/end deletion]

The Netelik Settlement on Northumberland Island was when [Myouk?] heard from it the refuge of the natives from the farthest south even of those from beyond [Wolstenholne?] and the last beyond about their barrier glacier. As [?] drove them they concentrated at [?] Stronghold and watched Hans says with great merriment song and dance and [?] merriment the gradual approach of starvation. [Now I am [rotted?] with news up to the date of Hans leaving Etah. ]

It seemed that the poor wretched suffered terribly even more than one neighbors of Etah. Their laws exact an equal division, and the success of the best hunsters was dissapated by the crowds of feeble claimants upon their spoils. At last the broken nature of the ice margin and the freezing up of a large zone of ice prevented them from seeking walrus. The water was inacessible, and the last resource [of killing their dogs] pressed itself [fell] upon them. They killed their dogs. Fearful as it sounds when we think how indispensable the services of the animals are to their daily existance, they cannot now number more than twenty in their entire [domain] ownership of the tribe. From glacier south to glacier north, from glacier east to the [?] ice bound coast which completes the circuit of their little world. This nation have but twenty dogs. What food can they hope for without their animals.