268 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



to the fact of my presence. I hud expected them to be more pleased 

 than surprised when tliey recognized me, and certainly I had not 

 expected the kind of surprise I found. I thought they had come 

 there to m^ et me and that they would be delighted once the meeting 

 had taken place. On that theory I could not interpret their be- 

 havior, although it was easily understandable when I realized that 

 they had come there with no idea of my being alive at all but 

 merely governed by a blind devotion to the orders of a man now 

 dead. 



After a few words of explanation from me, indicating that 

 Storkerson and Ole were coming behind, Crawford and Thomsen 

 set out to meet them, while Bernard took me into a tent, insisting 

 that I must eat. Somehow his first clear notion after he realized 

 that I was alive was the assumption that I must be starving. I 

 stopped him at that point and insisted on his looking closely at me 

 and seeing for himself that I was fatter and in better condition 

 than he had ever seen me before. He admitted it presently, but 

 insisted that I must, nevertheless, be craving "good grub." The 

 Captain was a great coffee drinker and could not understand how 

 anybody could go months without coffee. Bread, too, he consid- 

 ered a necessity of life, and fruits and various other articles of 

 food he supposed to be by their nature such that no one could be 

 healthy without them. He thought that any one deprived of these 

 things for months would long for them with a craving indescrib- 

 able. I tried to explain to the Captain that while I was hungry 

 for news I had very little appetite for his food, but I soon found 

 that it was easiest to accept a mug of coffee and some bread and 

 butter and commence nibbling and sipping. My doing so put the 

 Captain at his ease and he began to tell me the things I most 

 wanted to know. 



He had hardly started when the one member of the company 

 who had not been present at my arrival entered the door. This 

 was my old friend, W. J. Baur, whom I had known since 1906 

 under the name of "Levi," though he is no Hebrew by blood nor has 

 he any trait supposed to be characteristically Jewish. I had seen 

 Levi last when he had come from the Belvedere to bid us good-by 

 when we started out on the ice from Martin Point, and here he 

 was now steward of the Sachs and at the moment returned from a 

 successful duck hunt, with a shotgun in one hand and two or three 

 birds in the other. He was familiar with the "blond Eskimos;" in 

 fact, he had wintered among them in 1908 on the second whaling 

 ship to visit them, and that was two years before I saw them and 



