388 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



sort of competent man that can turn his hand to anything. Still 

 it was a surprise to him as well as to the rest of us, I think, that he 

 was able to despatch this huge beast as neatly as the most expert 

 whaleman. 



At Herschel Island our arrival on August 16th caused great ex- 

 citement. The Ruby was there beginning to unload ; there were also 

 four smaller schooners, the Hudson's Bay Company's Macpherson, 

 Captain Fritz Wolki's Gladiator, Captain Matt Andreasen's Olga, 

 and the Church of England's Atkon (or The Torch). As ice pilot on 

 the Macpherson was Jack Hadley, from whom I was now at last 

 to hear the full story of the Karluk tragedy. There was also our 

 own Alaska. Including sailors, police and missionaries there were 

 probably over fifty white men with perhaps two hundred Eskimos. 

 All but a few sailors were old friends of greater or less intimacy who 

 had been thinking us dead now for more than a year, some of them, 

 I believe, with considerable regret. But my arrival was a triumph 

 for Inspector Phillips and Captain Andreasen who had been main- 

 taining the difficult contention that we were alive. Captain Andrea- 

 sen, in fact, had just the day before been through a tall argument, 

 including a bet, with Captain Wolki, who had drawn on twenty- 

 six years of experience as a whaler and trapper at or east of Herschel 

 Island for arguments showing the folly of trying to "live off the coun- 

 try" in the Arctic. "Stefansson had a wonderful run of luck when 

 he lived off the country from 1909 to 1912," he had argued, "but it 

 was luck, and luck will turn." When the Captain came forward 

 through the crowd to shake hands as I landed, he remarked that he 

 had lost his argument and a bet but was glad of it. Matt Andreasen 

 went back and forward through the crowd saying, "I told you so." 



It became evident as soon as I talked with Captain Cottle that 

 we should have to wait several days to get at the stores he had 

 brought us, for some of the most important items were in the bottom 

 of the ship and would not become available until several hundred 

 tons of the Hudson's Bay Company's goods had been unloaded. This 

 was the largest consignment of trade goods ever brought in a single 

 ship to Herschel Island, though but a small fraction of the huge 

 quantities that used to be brought annually by the whaling fleet, 

 which numbered more than a dozen ships each year from 1889, when 

 the first vessels to winter east of Point Barrow did so at Herschel 

 Island, till 1906 when the invention of a commercial substitute for 

 whalebone brought the price of "bone" down from four or five dollars 

 the pound to thirty or forty cents. A large bowhead whale has 

 2,000 pounds of "head bone" and was worth $8,000 to $10,000 and 



