'^ REPORTED MISSING" 51 



is able to stir for pain : we spend our time in constant prayers, 

 to implore God's mercy to deliver us out of this misery, being 

 ready whenever he pleases to call us; we are certainly not in a 

 position to live thus long without food or fire, and cannot assist 

 one another in out mutual affiictions, but must every one bear 

 our own burthen." 



''They were buried," the editor of their journal says in con- 

 clusion, ''one by another, and certain stones laid upon their 

 graves, to hinder the ravenous beasts from digging up their 

 'carcases:' These were the last that pretended to pass the win- 

 ter at Spitzbergen." 



Two hundred years passed — two hundred years of Arctic 

 whaling — before the grim winter of 1837-38 caught and held 

 fast in the ice a v^hole fleet: "the missing whalers of Dundee." 



But two hundred years w^ere not enough. Given fifty more, 

 the vessels would have been stoutly reinforced with both iron 

 and heavy timbers, their bows further fortified with "angle 

 irons," and — gift of the gods — they would have been driven by 

 steam! The easy and profitable trips of the steam-driven 

 vessels of the late 19th Century were beyond the wildest dreams 

 of "the missing whalers." 



When the fleet set sail from Aberdeen and Dundee in April 

 of 1837 for their usual six-months' trip to the Davis Strait 

 fishing ground, there was no sort of indication that more or 

 less than the common adventures, hazards, and monotonies 

 of the whaling season were in store for them. They carried 

 the usual supply of provisions and the usual complement of 

 men, took on additional hands in Orkney and, proceeding north, 

 reached ice about the fifteenth of May. 



From one of them, the ship Dee of Aberdeen, Gamblin master, 

 we have a detailed account of that agonizing winter. She bore 

 northward through rather unsteady weather, loose ice, and 

 icebergs, to latitude QQ°, where the icebergs were so numerous 

 as seriously to alarm the crew and greatly to delay her passage. 

 She gained Northeast Bay, however, and the Frow Islands, 

 and thence, a westerly course proving impossible, she sailed 



