I have, however, always endeavored so to proportion provisions to the length of time in the field, that the dogs should be at least as well fed as myself.
A part of the scientific work of the expedition was a series of deep-sea soundings from Cape Columbia to the Pole.

The sounding apparatus of the expedition on leaving Cape Columbia comprised two wooden reels of a length equal to the width of the sledge, a detachable wooden crank to go on each end of the reel, to each reel a thousand fathoms (six thousand feet) of specially made steel piano wire of a diameter .028 inches, and one fourteen-pound lead having at its lower end a small bronze clam-shell device, self-tripping when it reached the bottom, for the purpose of bringing up samples of the ocean bed.

The weights of this outfit were as follows: each thousand fathoms of wire 12.42 pounds, each wooden reel 18 pounds, each lead 14 pounds.

A complete thousand-fathom outfit weighed 44.42 pounds.

The two outfits, therefore, weighed 89 pounds, and a third extra lead brought this total up to 103 pounds.
Both the sounding leads and the wire were made especially for the expedition, and so far as I know they were the lightest, for their capacity, that have ever been used.
[Illustration: TYPICAL CAMP ON THE ICE] One sounding apparatus was carried by the main division and the other by the pioneer party, in the early stages of our progress.