102 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



chance to be lifted up by ice that presses around her. This is the 

 theory upon which all explorers of late years have worked. The 

 traders who navigate the Beaufort Sea do not work on any such prin- 

 ciple, nor, in fact, on any principle at all, except that of using com- 

 monsense and then taking their chances with almost any kind of 

 craft. 



For instance, when Captain Cottle was in command of the Ruby^ 

 in 1915, he loaded her so heavily with a deck cargo of lumber that 

 her hatches had to be battened down and even in a quiet sea she had 

 eighteen inches of water over her decks. In other words, he was 

 navigating a sort of submarine. This would have been considered 

 a very heroic or a very foolish thing for an explorer to do, but 

 in a trader it attracted little attention. In addition to his crew 

 Captain Cottle had with him, as was usual, his wife, and on that 

 particular trip he also had Mr. and Mrs. C. Harding, who were 

 going to establish a trading post for the Hudson's Bay Company at 

 Herschel Island. Of course he could not have got in with the Ruby 

 in 1915 had it been an unfavorable ice season as in 1913. But in 

 he did come, landing his passengers and his cargo safely at Herschel 

 Island. 



Such navigation as that of the Ruby cannot be said to be based 

 on any system, but Matt Andreasen and the North Star had a sys- 

 tem that was very definite. The basic idea is that on most of the 

 north coast of Alaska and north coast of Canada the ocean is 

 shallow inshore, with a number of rivers in the spring bringing 

 warm water from the land to melt away the inshore ice. It happens 

 frequently that while the heavy ice still lies offshore so strong that 

 no ice breaker yet constructed could possibly get through it, there 

 is a lane of thaw water along the land through which a boat of very 

 small draft can worm her way, following the beach. Andreasen had 

 purposely built the North Star to draw only four feet two inches 

 of water, loaded, and in place of a keel a centerboard that could 

 be withdrawn into the body of the ship. He had demonstrated 

 through several seasons that he could wriggle along faster than strong 

 whalers could bunt and break their way eastward. 



Andreasen had made no attempt to build the North Star strong, 

 for he had a method of which he may have been the inventor, of 

 dealing with the closing in of the ice around her. The ship was only 

 about fifty feet long and could turn around almost in her own 

 length. When he saw the ice closing in and there seemed to be no 

 chance of getting out of the way entirely, he would select in the 

 neighborhood some big ice cake that sloped down to the water's edge 



