They could not leave until the sun returned on January 25, at the earliest. And because their floe was still drifting, there was the possibility that—given what Bartlett knew about the drift of the polar ice pack—they’d skirt beyond Wrangel Island and “slide westward and circle the Pole until, some years hence, we would possibly emerge down through the Greenland Sea.” That had happened to Nansen’s Fram twenty years before. “But by that time,” Bartlett committed to his log with a resigned frankness, “we should all be frozen stiff.”
