THE ARCTIC DISASTERS 273 



subsist on the food the vessel carried, and that the rest should 

 go to Brower's whaling station. 



Returning home, Brower assembled his natives and told them 

 that besides giving up all the provisions on hand to the white 

 men, they, having the furs for the work and being accustomed to 

 the Arctic winter, must journey inland to the mountains and 

 hunt deer to eke out the general food supply. 



Besides Brower's whaling station there was a schoolhouse at 

 Cape Smyth and an old refuge station, which the Government 

 had built to house a hundred men in just such an emergency. 

 But the missionary who taught natives in the schoolhouse 

 refused to give it up; and the Pacific Steam Whaling Company 

 had bought the refuge station and leased it to a man of science 

 who was using it for his researches and who would receive in it 

 only officers. Brower took as many of the poor fellows as he 

 could into his own home, and of necessity quartered in a ram- 

 shackle old building, which went by the name of ''Kelly's 

 old house" — a shack fifty feet long and twenty-five feet wide, 

 hard to heat and, if possible, harder to keep clean — the seventy- 

 eight for whom he had no place under his own roof. Thus, 

 with no more than enough food to postpone briefly their 

 appearance before the throne of judgment, and threatened 

 by scurvy as well as by starvation, the hapless men faced the 

 winter. 



In those vessels which had slipped out beyond Point Barrow 

 before the ice closed in upon the fleet, no Jim Dowden had 

 promised help; and indeed, none of those who were left behind 

 had asked for help. But the vessels that left the shipwrecked 

 whalers to their fate brought to San Francisco news that the 

 ships were lost; the telegraph wires carried the news across the 

 continent; the President of the United States laid the matter 

 before his cabinet; and the Government bestirred itself to send 

 help. Calling for volunteers to man the cutter Bear, just 

 back from her summer in the Arctic, the heads of the Revenue 

 Cutter Service ordered her north again. 



In eighteen days, so desperately did all hands hasten the 

 work, the expedition was equipped for a year in the North. 



