a fishing station belonging to Captain Bartlett's father, and took on a consignment of Labrador skin boots, for which we should have use in the North. Just before reaching the Island we encountered a furious thunderstorm. It was the most northerly thunderstorm which I remember having experienced.
I recall, however, that on our upward voyage in 1905 we ran into very heavy thunderstorms with electrical displays quite as sharp as any encountered in Gulf storms on voyages in southern waters, though the storms of 1905 were met in the neighborhood of Cabot Strait, far south of those of 1908.
Our voyage to Cape York was a peaceful one, lacking even the small excitement of the same journey three years before, when, not far from Cape St. George, all hands were startled by an alarm of fire which started in one of the main deck beams from the uptake of the boilers. Nor were we so plagued with fog in the early stages of our journey as we were in 1905. In fact, every omen was auspicious from the very start, so auspicious indeed that perhaps the more superstitious of the sailors thought our luck was too good to last, while one member of our expedition was continually "knocking on wood," just as a precaution, as he expressed it. It would be rash to say that his forethought had much to do with our success, but it eased his mind, at all events.
As we steamed steadily northward the nights grew shorter and shorter, and lighter and lighter, so that when we crossed the Arctic Circle, soon after midnight on July 26, we were in perpetual daylight. I have crossed the Circle some twenty times, going and coming, so the fine edge of that experience has been somewhat dulled for me; but the arctic "tenderfeet" among my party, Dr. Goodsell, MacMillan, and Borup, were appropriately impressed. They felt as one feels in crossing the equator the first time—that it is an event.
The Roosevelt, steaming ever northward, was now well on her way to one of the most interesting of all arctic localities. It is the little oasis amid a wilderness of ice and snow along the west coast of northern Greenland midway between Kane Basin on the north and Melville Bay on the south. Here, in striking contrast to the surrounding country, is animal and vegetable life in plenty, and in the course of the last hundred years some half dozen arctic expeditions have wintered here. Here, too, is the home of a little tribe of Eskimos.
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