THE ARCTIC DISASTERS 279 



Arctic nights when the fleets wintered in the north and waited 

 for the ice to break up and the bowheads to appear. In houses 

 completely buried under snow, the want of food and exercise 

 told on the men's health, and monotony and anxiety worked 

 ugly changes in their thoughts and faces; so that when they 

 came out from hibernation, only a man's voice might be familiar 

 to his mates. The craving for tobacco, too, brought out 

 petty thieving and suspicion — even the offer to barter away 

 all a man possessed, all his family had to live on. But it was 

 not all so sordid. Som.e of the log books hint at strange tales of 

 Esquimaux visitors, and ball games on the ice, and dances and 

 dramatics below decks, and hunting parties that kings might 

 envy. Winter sports in the Arctic, whether practised by 

 whalers or by explorers for the Northwest Passage and the 

 Pole, have been much the same, the Arctic Circle round, for 

 more than a hundred years. And besides the merely quaint 

 incidents of the long night, some of those books have thumb- 

 nail sketches of thrilling fights with bear and walrus, of crude 

 surgery and clever mechanical contrivances, of men caught 

 in tangled lines and whipped out of their boats and into eternity 

 in the merest fraction of a second. 



But there is little bowhead whaling now, and, for the matter 

 of that, little right whaling either. The price of baleen and of 

 oil is ruinously low; the expenses are ruinously high. Few 

 white men or Esquimaux lie in wait for the unwary bowhead 

 and paddle silently over its neck in the channel of open water 

 that the peculiar shape of the beast leaves between hump and 

 back, and strike at its backbone with a bomb gun. But the 

 men who pursued our Arctic whaling were, for a while, the 

 pioneers of their generation. Their faults and virtues were 

 those of frontiersmen, and Time, dealing kindly with the sordid 

 and disagreeable, as is its way, is lifting from surroundings of 

 soon-forgotten drudgery, the unforgettable adventure of it all. 



Half a century has passed since the fateful autumn of 1871, 

 but the booming voice of an old whaling captain is still to be 

 heard saying, "Tell them I will wait for them as long as I have 

 an anchor left, or a spar to carry sail." 



