"During the next march we traveled through a thick, low-lying, smoky haze drifting over the ice before a biting air from the northeast. At the end of the march we came upon the Captain camped beside a wide open lead with a dense black water sky northwest, north, and northeast. We built our igloos and turned in but before I had fallen asleep I was roused out by a movement of the ice and found a startling condition of affairs - a rapidly widening road of black water ran but a few feet from our igloos. One of my teams of dogs had escaped by only a few feet from being dragged by the movement of the ice into the water.

Another team had an equally narrow escape from being crushed by the ice blocks piled over them. The ice on the north side of the lead was moving around eastward. The small floor on which were the Captain's igloos was drifting eastward in the open water, and the side of our igloos threatened to follow suit.

Kicking out the door of the igloos, I called to the Captain's men to pack their sledges and be ready for a quick dash when a favorable chance arrived.

We hurried our things on our sledges, hitched the dogs, and moved on to a large floe west of us. Then, leaving one man to look out for the dogs and sledges, we hurried over to assist the Captain's party to join us.

A corner of their raft impinged on the ice on our side. For the rest of the night and during the next day the ice suffered the toments of the damned, surging together, opening out, groaning, and grinding, while the open water belched black smoke like a prairie fire. Then the motion ceased; the open water closed, the atmosphere to the north was cleared, and we rushed across before the ice should open again."

from The Conquest of the North Pole

The New York Times

September 12 1909