Northward over the great ice : a narrative of life and work along the shores and upon the interior ice-cap of northern Greenland in the years 1886 and 1891-1897, with a description of the little tribe of Smith Sound Eskimos, the most northerly human beings in the world, and an account of the discovery and bringing home of the Saviksue or great Cape York meteorites . ack thatit looked as if it had been visited by a fire. I thinkno such phenomenal war of the elements, no such,wild freak of the Arctic fohn, has ever before beenobserved in this latitude in the month of February. We had experienced
Northward over the great ice : a narrative of life and work along the shores and upon the interior ice-cap of northern Greenland in the years 1886 and 1891-1897, with a description of the little tribe of Smith Sound Eskimos, the most northerly human beings in the world, and an account of the discovery and bringing home of the Saviksue or great Cape York meteorites . ack thatit looked as if it had been visited by a fire. I thinkno such phenomenal war of the elements, no such,wild freak of the Arctic fohn, has ever before beenobserved in this latitude in the month of February. We had experienced an accentuated instance of theGreenland fohn,—a word borrowed from the meteor-ology of Switzerland, to designate the most remark-able of the local winds of that country, a south, warmwind that occurs in the Alps, most frequently in thespring. I expected to hear later of our February fohn inother parts of Greenland, and I was not disappointed. Imprisoned on the Ice-Cap 215 Lieut. Ryder was living for nine montlis at ScoresbySound, on the coast of East Greenland, while wewere at McCormick Bay. He was about four hun-dred and fifty geographical miles south of us. Themaximum temperatures he recorded occurred in Feb-ruary and May. He says {Pcterrnanns Mitteilitngcn,xi., 1892, page 265) that these high temperatureswere due to severe fohn storms, one of which, in. AMONG THE RUINS. February (date not given), suddenly raised the ther-mometer to +50° F., 8^° higher than my instru-ments had recorded. Like us, also, he had experiencedhis lowest temperature in February. Rainfall in theneighbourhood of McCormick Bay during February,or in other words during the sunrise period, is, ac-cording to native reports, almost unprecedented. The experience upon the ice-cap, in its actualities ofdiscomfort and possibilities of worse, was the mostserious incident in all the ice-cap work of the Expedi-tion of 1891-1892. To me it was an old story. Ihad twice been through similar experiences in 1886. 2i
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, booksubjecteskimos, bookyear1898
