144 The Story of the New England Whalers 



at a right, or any other, angle from the original 

 course when points at sea, indicated by their curi- 

 ous charts, had been reached. How they were 

 able to read their woven sticks they could not 

 explain, neither did they know the origin of such 

 curious contrivances, but they understood the 

 things themselves, and they made crooked pas- 

 sages, hundreds of miles in length, with success. 

 Of course they failed sometimes: white men, 

 more learned, did that at times, too; and a crew 

 that had failed had landed on Fanning's Island, 

 built a rude hut, planted gardens, and finally 

 died there alone. 



Still more weird was a tale of the Arctic. In 

 August, 1775, Captain Warrens, of the whaler 

 Greenland, while drifting in a calm among a vast 

 herd of icebergs off the Greenland coast, saw a 

 vessel that seemed to be badly dismantled aloft. 

 His "curiosity was so much excited that he imme- 

 diately leaped into his boat with several seamen 

 and rowed toward her," says an old newspaper 

 account. "On approaching he observed that her 

 hull was miserably weather-beaten and not a soul 

 appeared upon deck. He hailed her crew several 



