260 WHALING 



in the open sea, was manifestly impossible when a vessel was in 

 the ice; but irons and bomb-guns were kept always at hand, and 

 sometimes men watching open water from the deck would 

 strike and ''save" a whale. Thus working north into the Arctic 

 Ocean, where they stooped to hunting walrus, whose oil a rash 

 experimenter had discovered was well worth taking — as the 

 Basques had discovered hundreds of years earlier — the whalers 

 would continue to skirt the pack and strike occasional whales, 

 until the young ice forced them to leave for the season, which 

 happened, usually, by the middle of October. 



By the first of May, 1871, the fleet was nearing Cape Thaddeus, 

 and by the first of June, Cape Navarino. In the Sea of Anadir 

 and in Bering Sea whales in abundance augured a successful 

 year; but the ice in Bering Sea, although not so heavy as the 

 Arctic ice, ordinarily made it necessary to work the ships with 

 care, and that year it was much heavier than is common so far 

 south. It damaged several vessels, and stove the bark Oriole 

 so badly that late in June her officers and crew abandoned her 

 in Plover Bay, whither, with the assistance of men who came 

 from other ships in answer to her signal of distress, they had 

 conveyed her by dint of much pumping. 



Taking with them the men from the abandoned Oriole, which 

 they left to rot out her white-oak planks and timbers on the 

 bleak shore of northern Asia, the vessels moved on from Plover 

 Bay toward the strait, whither the whales had proceeded on 

 their annual migration into the Arctic; and in the strait they 

 picked up a second forlorn little band of men. 



Such a catastrophe as the loss of the Oriole was too common to 

 be ominous, and there was no reason at the time to regard the 

 appearance of a few shipwrecked sailors as portentous; but a 

 little later it took no lively im.agination to consider both as 

 unsuspected omens. 



The men were the survivors of the crew of the lost bark Japan, 

 which had gone down off that out-thrust finger of northern 

 Asia, Cape East, at the end of the season before. It is easy to 

 picture them, dark figures working their way slowly over the 

 dangerous ice, toward the distant masts and spars of the 



