Cape York, or Melville Bay, is the dividing line between the civilized world on the one side and the arctic world on the other--the arctic world with its equipment of Eskimos, dogs, walrus, seal, fur clothing, and aboriginal experience.
Behind me lay the civilized world, which was now absolutely useless, and which could give me nothing more.

Ahead of me lay that trackless waste through which I must literally cut my way to the goal.

Even the ship's journey from Cape York to winter quarters on the north coast of Grant Land is not "plain sailing"; in fact, it is not sailing at all during the later stages; it is jamming and butting and dodging and hammering the ice, with always the possibility that the antagonist will hit back a body blow.

It is like the work of a skilled heavy-weight pugilist, or the work of an old Roman fighter with the cestus.
Beyond Melville Bay the world, or what we know as the world, is left behind.

On leaving Cape York, we had exchanged the multifarious purposes of civilization for the two purposes for which there is room in those wide wastes: food for man and dog, and the covering of miles of distance.
Behind me now lay everything that was mine, everything that a man personally loves, family, friends, home, and all those human associations which linked me with my kind.