We left Irving Bay on the 30th of June, caching all our heavy stuff in
order to lighten the sled as much as possible, and reached Cape Felix
on the 3d of July, having lain over one day on the north side of Wall
Bay. We saw no traces of the Franklin expedition until we arrived at
our place of encampment, near Cape Felix. The walking, however, was
developing new tortures for us every day. We were either wading through
the hill-side torrents or lakes, which, frozen on the bottom, made the
footing exceedingly treacherous, or else with seal skin boots, rendered
soft by constant wetting, painfully plodding over sharp clay stones,
set firmly in the ground, with the edges pointing up, or lying flat and
slipping as we stepped upon them and sliding the unwary foot into a
crevice that would seemingly wrench it from the body. These are some of
the features of a walk on King William Land, and yet we moved about ten
miles a day, and made as thorough a search as was possible. All rocky
places that looked anything like opened graves or torn-down cairns--in
fact, all places where stones of any kind seemed to have been gathered
together by human hands--were examined, and by spreading out at such
intervals as the nature of the ground indicated, covered the greatest
amount of territory. Lieutenant Schwatka carried his double-barrelled
shotgun and killed a great many ducks and geese, and I, with my Sharp's
rifle, got an occasional reindeer.
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