3. On the morning of the 10th of April (the thermometer standing at 5° F.) we divided the tent; one half was put on the dog-sledge, the other was pitched, with its open side close under the rock. Before a caravan takes the desert, the camels are watered, and we too, though in a very different kind of desert, exposed to the constant evil of thirst, would gladly have been treated in like fashion. But we had to content ourselves with a pint of boiling water, served out to each of us every morning, reminding us, indeed, of coffee, for 2 lbs. of it were boiled in 105 gallons of water in the course of thirty days. The provisions were divided, and enough for eight days was dealt out to the party starting to the north, Orel, Zaninovitch, Klotz, myself, and two dogs. The special requirements of our expedition, among which were a rifle and a revolver, raised the weight of our sledge to about 4 cwt., which it was the business of the dogs to draw without any assistance from us, and this they did over the level snow with such zeal, that we had some trouble in keeping up with them.
4. The merits of our dogs I have hitherto left unnoticed, in order emphatically to assert that we owed the passing beyond the eighty-second degree of north latitude not to our own exertions, but to the endurance and courage of these animals. No kind of life among dogs is comparable for hardships with the life of a dog in an Arctic sledge. His tent is scarcely the pretext of a shelter, and his natural coat is generally covered by a thick rime. The snow when it drifts completely covers him, though he constantly but vainly seeks to shake it off. He draws his breath with difficulty, hunger gnaws at his bowels, and his wounded feet colour the snow with blood. Often, too, these poor animals amid the great cold must keep still; then they lift up their paws alternately, to prevent frost-bite. The two dogs, which accompanied us to the extreme North, were the noblest animals ever employed in a sledge expedition, and when I recall the great services they rendered us, both now and afterwards in the return to Europe, their sad end fills me with sincere sorrow. Jubinal and Torossy were dogs of remarkable size and strength, and escaped the epidemic diseases[46] which attacked the dogs of Hayes and Kane; and though it has been thought that the dogs of the Eskimo and of the Siberian people were alone adapted for Arctic expeditions, our experience with our own dogs most of them brought from Vienna, proves that they were not a whit less useful. Our dogs had only one defect: they had not been trained to sledge-drawing from their youth, but had been broken to it only during our expedition, and were therefore not always amenable to discipline. When left to themselves in dragging the sledge they went on, without turning to the right or left, from cape to cape, and if they found themselves on a wide plain of ice, and far from all striking landmarks, they ran either towards the sun or moon, or some remarkable star. It was against the grain with them to have to drag in the teeth of the wind, and if they had to push on amid hummocks of ice, they immediately began to growl. They were fed in the morning, and more particularly in the evening, and they showed a delicacy of taste in discriminating between bear’s flesh and the despised seal’s flesh. While they carefully avoided coming near us before our start, provided they were not very hungry, in order to escape being harnessed, yet when harnessed nothing could exceed their vigour and persistence in dragging.