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[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?]

[recto]

[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.