In the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society for August of 1875, Adm. Sir Francis Leopold McClintock published a piece with the title “On Arctic Sledge Travelling,” in which he wrote that the first sledge party to look for Franklin had managed five hundred miles in forty days. They had two sleds, each drawn by six men. “The labour of doing so is most excessive,” he wrote, and of the twelve men at the end “five were completely knocked up, and every man required a considerable time under medical care to recruit his strength.”
People unacquainted with sledging tended, he wrote, to think “that we either skate over glassy ice, or walk on snow-shoes over snow of any considerable depth,” he went on. “Salt-water ice is not so smooth as to be slippery; to skate upon it is very possible, though very fatiguing. But hardly is the sea frozen over, when the snow falls, and remains upon it all winter. When it first falls, snow is often soft, and perhaps a foot or fifteen inches deep; but it is blown about by every wind, until having become like the finest sand, and hardened under a severe temperature, it consolidates into a covering of a few inches’ depth, and becomes so compact, that the sledge-runner does not sink more than an inch or so: its specific gravity is then about half that of water.
“This expanse of snow is rarely smooth: it is broken into ridges or furrows by every strong wind.” These “inequalities are seldom more than a foot high, they add greatly to the labour of travelling, especially when obliged to cross them at right angles.
“As the spring season advances, the old winter snow becomes softened, fresh snow falls, and sledging is made more laborious still.
“At length the thaw arrives; the snow becomes a sludgy mixture, with wet snow on top and water beneath, through which men and sledges sink down to the ice below. It is now almost impossible to get along at all.”
Moreover, “We seldom find either unbroken ice, or ice so crushed up into ridges that we cannot get over it at all, but, as a rule, crushed up or hummocky ice, three or four feet in height, is of very frequent occurrence, and of course adds much to the labour of sledging.”
Sir George Nares, who led an expedition to discover the pole in 1875, tried to prepare his crew for sledging by telling them “that if they could ever imagine the hardest work they had ever been called upon to perform in their lives intensified to the utmost degree, it would only be as child’s play in comparison with the work they would have to perform whilst sledging.”
Typically while sledging, men ate six or eight pounds of meat a day and sometimes as many as sixteen.