Later two or three sledge loads of supplies broke through, and the Eskimos with them; but as the water was only five or six feet deep, and the supplies were packed in tins, no serious damage was done.
While the oil was being unloaded, a party of men went out with ice chisels, poles, saws, and so forth, chopping away the ice so that we could warp the _Roosevelt_ in, broadside to the shore.

Bartlett and I were determined to get the ship beyond the floe-berg barrier and into the shallow water of the ice-foot.

We were not looking forward to another winter of such torment as we had lived through on the last previous expedition, with the ship just on the edge of the ice-foot and subject to every movement of the hostile pack outside.
[Illustration: THE ROOSEVELT ON SEPTEMBER 12, 1908 Marie Ahnighito Peary's Birthday] After the oil cases came the tons of whale meat from the quarter-deck, some of it in chunks as large as a Saratoga trunk.

It was thrown over the side onto the ice, sledged ashore by the Eskimos, some hundred yards over the ice-foot, and heaped in great piles, protected by the bags of coal which had also been taken from the quarter-deck.

Then came the whale-boats, which were lowered from the davits and run ashore like sledges.