cleaned, and the cargo overhauled and re-stowed to put the vessel in
fighting trim for her coming encounter with the ice. About three hundred
tons of coal were transferred from the _Erik_ to the _Roosevelt_, and
about fifty tons of walrus and whale meat.

Fifty tons of coal were cached at Etah for the _Roosevelt's_ expected
return the following year. Two men, boatswain Murphy and Pritchard, the
cabin boy, with full provisions for two years, were left in charge.
Harry Whitney, a summer passenger on the _Erik_, who was ambitious to
obtain musk-oxen and polar bears, asked permission to remain with my two
men at Etah. The permission was granted, and Mr. Whitney's belongings
were landed.

At Etah, Rudolph Franke, who had come north with Dr. Cook in 1907, came
to me and asked permission to go home on the _Erik_. He showed me a
letter from Dr. Cook directing him to go home this season on a whaler.
An examination by Dr. Goodsell, my surgeon, showed that the man suffered
from incipient scurvy, and that he was in a serious mental state, so I
had no alternative but to give him passage home on the _Erik_. Boatswain
Murphy, whom I was to leave at Etah, was a thoroughly trustworthy man,
and I gave him instructions to prevent the Eskimos from looting the
supplies and equipment left there by Dr. Cook, and to be prepared to
render Dr. Cook any assistance he might require when he returned, as I
had no doubt he would as soon as the ice froze over Smith Sound
(presumably in January) so as to enable him to cross to Anoratok from
Ellesmere Land, where I had no doubt he then was.

On the _Erik_ were three other passengers, Mr. C. C. Crafts, who had
come north to take a series of magnetic observations for the department
of terrestrial magnetism of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, Mr.
George S. Norton, of New York, and Mr. Walter A. Larned, the tennis
champion. The _Roosevelt's_ carpenter, Bob Bartlett, of Newfoundland
(not related to Captain Bob Bartlett), and a sailor named Johnson also
went back on the _Erik_. That vessel was commanded by Captain Sam
Bartlett (Captain Bob's uncle), who had been master of my own ship on
several expeditions.

At Etah we took on a few more Eskimos, including Ootah and Egingwah, who
were destined to be with me at the Pole; and I left there all the
remaining Eskimos that I did not wish to take with me to winter quarters
in the North. We retained forty-nine--twenty-two men, seventeen women,
ten childr