THE ARCTIC DISASTERS 271 



The poor fellows who were trailing along after the captain's 

 party succeeded in reaching the edge of open water; but no 

 sooner did they come fairly into sight of the Bear, which lay 

 five or six miles away, than fog again set in. A strong current 

 was running north and the ice at the edge of the pack began to 

 break up. Small cakes with one or two men on them floated 

 away. Some of the men, trying to jump from one cake 

 to another, were drowned; others died of cold and hunger. 

 When a steam whaler rescued the sixteen survivors, all on a 

 single cake of ice, they had become so weak that their rescuers 

 had to pick them up and carry them to the boat. 



The Narvarck, meanwhile, drifted close to Cape Simpson and 

 froze in, and the ten men who had remained on board her — it is 

 one of the many examples of the irony of life in the Arctic! — 

 calmly walked ashore and spent the winter at a whaling and 

 trading station. 



Presently a northeast gale set the Narvarck free again. She 

 drifted south off Cape Smyth, was driven in shore by the chang- 

 ing currents, and there, to provide fuel for her shipwrecked 

 mariners, gave up her existence as a whaling vessel. The loss 

 of the Narvarck is in itself a story worth telling; but that same 

 year a greater occurred. 



In the 'nineties, the fleet would reach Point Barrow early in 

 August and follow the whales east to the mouth of the Mac- 

 kenzie River or even farther. There they found the best hunt- 

 ing, and ordinarily, if they started back by the middle of 

 September, they would pass Point Barrow in safety and work 

 west to the coast of Siberia, whaling as they went; and south 

 through Bering Strait by the middle of October. But in 1897, 

 fall weather came exceptionally early. When the fleet ap- 

 proached Point Barrow, northerly winds had driven the pack 

 ice to the shore and the new ice was forming. Eight vessels — 

 the bark Wanderer, the schooner Rosario, and the steamer 

 Belvedere, Fearless, Jeannie, Jessie H. Freeman, Newport, and 

 Orca — were cut off from the open sea. 



The crews of the imprisoned vessels did not, as in 1871, es- 

 cape with the rest of the fleet, and their position was critical. 



