THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 23 



was surprised at their kindness, courtesy and hospitality. I was 

 surprised at how little conspicuous were the filth and other horrors 

 I had read about, although there was enough for literary material 

 if suitably magnified. But what surprised me most was that the 

 sun was sinking lower every day and the darkness coming on apace 

 without these benighted people appearing to worry at all over the 

 circumstance. Four of them could speak broken English. As I 

 remember it now, three out of these four expressed a frank surprise 

 when I intimated that I dreaded the coming darkness; but the 

 fourth said that he was familiar with the thought, for he had been 

 on whaling ships and had often heard "tenderfeet" who were spend- 

 ing their first winter in the Arctic talking about the coming dark- 

 ness. He himself had been put up to it by some mischievous per- 

 sons to invent for the benefit of these green hands dreadful stories 

 about the gloom of a coming winter. But privately he regarded 

 dread of the darkness as one of the peculiarities of white men which 

 he did not understand, and he went on to say that he noticed that 

 the old whalers who had been in the North a long time soon got 

 over it. 



This ought to have been encouraging. But I was so obsessed 

 with the "winter night" that I actually succeeded in working myself 

 into something of a depression, and when, after an absence of 

 several weeks, the sun came again, I walked half a mile to the top 

 of a hill to get the first possible glimpse of it and wrote in my 

 diary what a cheerful and wonderful sight it was. I never did this 

 again. Now, after ten winters in the North, the return of the 

 sun is scarcely more impressive to me, though more definitely noted, 

 than the stopping of it at the summer or winter solstice when I 

 am living in New York. And if I make mention of it in my diary 

 the entry is never longer than half a line and is usually when I am 

 on a journey to indicate roughly the latitude — for the day upon 

 which the sun returns and the portion of it visible above the horizon 

 the first day depend mainly on two factors, the latitude and the 

 refraction, which latter in turn depends in part on temperature. 



I have found that the ordinary ship's crew can be divided with 

 regard to the arctic night into three sections: The most intelligent 

 men, such as for instance young college graduates, can have the 

 fear of the darkness explained away completely and they will pass 

 their first "winter night" without any noticeable depression. The 

 second group, such as the typical sailor or Alaska miner, have heard 

 a great deal about how depressing the darkness is and you can 

 explain yourself black in the face without their believing you. 



