A relief party should therefore be
provided with a branding-iron and moveable letters, and with paints, and
they should mark the tree in many places. A couple of hours spent in
doing this would leave more marks than the desultory efforts of roving
savages would be likely to efface. A good sign to show that Europeans
have visited a spot is a saw mark (no savages use saws): it catches the
eye directly.
A system occasionally employed by Arctic expeditions, of making a cache
10 feet true north (and not magnetic north) from the cairn or mark,
deserves to be generally employed, at least with modifications. Let me
therefore suggest, that persons who find a cairn built of a tree marked,
so as to attract notice, and who are searching blindly in all directions
for further clue, should invariably dig out and examine that particular
spot. The notice deposited there may consist of no more than a single
sentence, to indicate some distant point as the place where the longer
letter is buried. I hope it will be understood, that the precaution of
always burying a notice 10 feet true north of the cairn mark is proposed
as additional to and not in the place of other contrivances for giving
information. There will often arise some doubt as to the exact point in
the circumference of the cairn or mark whence the 10 feet measurement
should be made. This is due to the irregularity of the bases of all such
marks.
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