THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 393 



Harbor and help make the Alaska ready for the summer of 1916, 

 as well as overhaul several gasoline engines which our men were 

 using both for the propulsion of their regular launch and for other 

 boats to which power could be attached. My success in making 

 this arrangement with Captain Allan made me feel very much 

 more at ease with regard to the future so far as the southern sec- 

 tion was concerned. 



At this time the mission schooner Atkon, under command of 

 the Reverend H. Girling, was ready to start but lacked two very 

 important things: they had no experienced sailors aboard and 

 there was no local man available who could guide them through 

 the devious channels of the Mackenzie delta. Had the Atkon been 

 a bigger boat and less heavily loaded she could have taken the open 

 sea route, passing outside the delta shoals, but she was not strong 

 and without really expert sailors this would have been too danger- 

 ous. I had already arranged for the transfer of Hadley from the 

 service of the Hudson's Bay Company to that of the expedition, 

 and one of my recently engaged Eskimos, Illun, knew all the in- 

 tricacies of the delta channel. I accordingly loaned Hadley and 

 Illun to the Atkon to take her through as far as Cape Bathurst, 

 expecting that they would get there long before we did, having 

 several days the start. 



As our stay at Herschel Island kept lengthening, it became clear 

 that before we could get our cargo aboard and the goods landed 

 in Banks Island I should have had to pay out in chartering fees 

 as much as the Polar Bear was worth. When I realized this I ap- 

 proached Captain Lane on the question of whether the ship was for 

 sale and found that she was. I eventually bought her. The price 

 was necessarily high in view of the fact that selling the ship at 

 this time would destroy all his prospects of profit from trading or 

 whaling during this voyage. I had formed the opinion of the Polar 

 Bear the year before that she was an ideal ship for our work and 

 had so reported to the Naval Service, urging that if any ship were 

 needed for work in icy waters (as, for instance, in Hudson's Bay) it 

 would be well for the Government to buy her. Moreover, though 

 the price seemed high at the time, it was not as much as Captain 

 Lane would have been able to get had he gone south and disposed 

 of his ship at the time when wooden vessels were at the top of their 

 war price during the period of greatest scarcity of shipping. 



A condition of sale of the Polar Bear was that Captain Lane 

 could get some other ship in which to take out with him his pur- 

 chases of fur and those of his crew who did not care to enter the 



