272 WHALING 



All had expected to reach San Francisco by the end of the year; 

 none had enough supplies for the winter and they could expect 

 no help before spring. The Wanderer, slipping quietly away 

 from the rest as soon as her captain apprehended the situation, 

 returned to Herschel Island where the Mary D. Hume, with 

 supplies for two years, was wintering. The others, facing, 

 with whatever fortitude they could muster, the imminent pros- 

 pect of starvation, took all means in their power to avert it. 



The crews of the Orca, the Freeman, and the Belvidere, by 

 prodigious blasting and cutting, got their vessels round Point 

 Barrow and some fifty miles farther south, but there the pack 

 closed in upon the Orca and crushed her. No sooner had the 

 crew escaped to the Belvidere, than the Orca sank. The same 

 day the straining and cracking of the beams and timbers of the 

 Freeman so badly frightened her men that they, like the crew 

 of the Orca, fled over the ice to the Belvidere, which had got 

 behind the Sea-Horse Islands where the full pressure of the 

 pack could not reach her, and within two days, natives burned 

 the Freeman. 



The new predicament was in certain respects exactly three 

 times worse than the one before: three crews, two of them 

 having lost v/hatever stores they had until then possessed, were 

 crowded into one vessel, whose supplies were utterly inadequate 

 for her own men. 



The Rosario lay very near Point Barrow; the Fearless and the 

 Newport lay fifteen miles east and about a mile from land; the 

 Jeannie lay thirty miles farther east and about four miles from 

 land. All of them v/ere fast frozen in. Where the Wanderer 

 was, the others did not then know. 



Now there was, at Cape Smyth, about ten miles from Point 

 Barrow, a shore whaling station in charge of one Charles D. 

 Brower who had lived for many years in northern Alaska. He 

 employed two hundred natives and he had enough provisions 

 to feed them during the winter, but very far from enough to 

 feed, in addition, three hundred whalers. Brower went out to 

 the fleet and sat in council with the captains, and they decided 

 that as many men should remain on board each vessel as could 



