The Stefánsson-Anderson Arctic Expedition of the American Museum

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: a time when Pamiungittok's son, Aglervittok, was a boy of about ten years or as Pamiungittok said, when he was big enough to walk all day behind the sled and to shoot ptarmigan; he was not big enough to hunt caribou. Aglervittok appears to be about twenty-five years of age although he may be thirty. It is therefore from fifteen to twenty years since this last visit. At that time there was nothing left of the iron of the Investigator except some big pieces that were so unwieldy they could not be handled by the Eskimo. The ship had long ago disappeared. Pamiungittok did not know how the break-up took place or when, but it was not very long after she was first discovered by the Eskimo. Ship's timbers and pieces of wreckage which they recognize as belonging to the Investigator have been found in Prince of Wales Strait at various points north of Ramsay Island. This shows not only the fact that the vessel has been broken up, which is not particularly interesting as it could have been surely predicted, but also the more interesting thing that the winds or currents, or both, in this section are such as to bring drift materials down from the north into Prince of Wales Strait. From the scarcity of driftwood on the south coast of Banks Island and Victoria Island and from its abundance in Prince of Wales Strait, as described by both the English navigators, it seems probable that this wood must have passed from the Mackenzie River north along the west coast of Banks Island and east around its north end. At present no people occupy Banks Island in summer although it is known to be fairly well stocked with both musk-oxen and caribou. The caribou, however, are not in such vast numbers here as in Victoria Island, which is filled by the migrations coming from the mainland in the spring altho...