THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 579 



a little lackadaisical in providing against the future. No part of 

 their new Christian knowledge is more welcome to them and less 

 necessary than the behest from the Sermon on the Mount, "Take 

 ye no heed for the morrow." They have not the proverb but their 

 whole lives are an exemplification of the belief that "The Lord will 

 provide." In, the Arctic He usually does provide for each day 

 according to its needs; but we wanted to get a few days ahead so 

 as to have a good start in the spring. Now that Castel was to be 

 in command of his own detachment I wanted to outfit him as much 

 in accordance with his tastes as possible, hence my idea of giving 

 him all the potatoes we had. In general I wanted to take to 

 Grassy most of the groceries from the Bernier cache, intending to 

 station there the few men who preferred groceries to meat. When 

 groceries were available there was, of course, no reason why who- 

 ever wanted to live on flour and biscuit and beans should not do so, 

 providing they ate enough fresh meat along with these things to 

 prevent scurvy. 



I was once nearly a vegetarian, not by principle but by taste. 

 The reason I prefer meat in the North is that caribou herds are 

 more numerous than restaurants or groceries. But now we had a 

 grocery store at Winter Harbor and there seemed no reason why 

 we should not eat hard bread and honey as well as dried meat, for 

 the same government that had sustained Bernier's expedition was 

 sustaining ours, and knowing well the kindheartedness of Bernier 

 himself, I felt sure that even he would be willing to look upon our 

 men in their present state of desire as coming within the meaning 

 of the "shipwrecked crews" mentioned in his proclamation. 



And in a way it was shipwreck, since our ship had not come and 

 this would normally mean that she had been wrecked. I could 

 well imagine under what headlines the news of our situation might 

 have been printed if some one had brought it to the yellow jour- 

 nals. In high capitals (red in some cases) it would have been 

 something like this: "DARKNESS OF ARCTIC NIGHT DE- 

 SCENDS UPON HELPLESS PARTY MAROONED ON MEL- 

 VILLE ISLAND." Bernier's four and a half tons of food, when 

 you considered what sort of food it was, would certainly not feed 

 seventeen of us till we could be rescued in the spring, even should 

 we begin with rations and end by killing and eating all our dogs. 



Public sympathy can easily be stirred over the wrong situa- 

 tions. In 1897 several United States whaling ships were held in 

 the ice at Point Barrow, and the owners in New Bedford and San 

 Francisco considered that the ships were well provisioned and in 



