THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 45 



in the Atlantic they had lost ship after ship by following the 

 Atlantic rule of keeping twenty miles away from land. Their ex- 

 perience had been that if ships stuck among the Atlantic ice they 

 were very likely to get loose again eventually, for in most places 

 the current runs south into freer waters where the ice slackens out. 

 But north of Alaska they had found conditions diametrically oppo- 

 site. There a ship that gets into the ice and starts moving with 

 it is not likely ever to get out, for the pack gets tighter instead of 

 loosening, and the drift is not southward but northward to the 

 more ice-infested regions. I had heard these captains tell that 

 over half a hundred ships had been lost by the American whaling 

 fleet in the Beaufort Sea before they finally adopted the rule of 

 always keeping between the land and the ice. Since then a few 

 vessels had been lost, but the proportion had been far less and 

 there was always this difference: that formerly when ships were 

 far from land the men had great difficulty in making their escape 

 by boats or sledges, and all cargoes were invariably lost; while of 

 recent years if a ship had been squeezed against the land or sunk 

 by pressure near shore, the crews had never been in serious danger. 

 Entire cargoes had been saved in some cases, and the more valuable 

 parts of them in others. This was so well known that whenever a 

 whaler sank near shore without saving the best of her cargo, the 

 talk in the whaling fleet was that the size of the insurance policy 

 explained the loss. 



So ran the arguments of the local whaler. In reply to them it 

 could be said that while these conservative practices were all right 

 for merchantmen, a bolder policy might reasonably be expected of 

 explorers whose chief concern was neither the saving of cargoes 

 nor the collection of insurance policies. One flaw in the whaler 

 argument was that the fifty ships lost might not have been lost at 

 all but for the timidity through which they had usually been aban- 

 doned by their crews. Who knew but they might have been trium- 

 phantly extricated if the crews had stayed by them a month or a 

 year? We certainly would not abandon the Karluk if she were 

 caught in offshore ice. 



Bartlett and I discussed these things fully, and decided for the 

 more conservative alternative. We steamed inshore according 

 to local practice and followed the edge of the ice until, when it 

 prevented further eastward progress, we finally anchored at Cross 

 Island. This is one of an interrupted chain of reefs which lie about 

 fifteen miles north from the mainland coast of Alaska, separated 

 from it by a "lagoon." Between the reefs and the main shore are 



