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moment, and make rescue impossible. The Bear was to make a third 

 attempt as soon as she could replenish her fuel supply, but there was no 

 certainty that it would b? successful. There were three whaling ships 

 in the Arctic, each one of which would have made an individual attempt 

 at rescue had they not been sure that the Bear would reach the island. 

 Now they were hundreds of miles to the northward. Jafet Lindeberg, 

 as I learned later when he was the first to congratulate Swenson on 

 his daring rescue, had chartered the Corwin, which was then being 

 outfitted. 



"But the King and Winge was in the Nome roadstead, ready to 

 proceed anywhere at a moment's notice. She was a halibut schooner, 

 but she was sheathed with Australian iron bark and equipped with 

 excellent gasoline engines. Olaf Swenson, of Seattle, was primarily 

 in the Arctic to trade with Siberian natives and hunt walrus, but he 

 quickly abandoned these remunerative projects when I represented to 

 him the extreme danger of my former comrades. Theretofore, be it 

 said to his credit, he had hesitated about joining in the rescue because, 

 like others, he had thought the Bear would be successful; he did not 

 wish to deprive the Bear of any glory which she might earn. But 

 now, I pointed out, the time for formalities was over; either the sur- 

 vivors must be rescued within ten days at the most or they surely would 

 starve to death during the winter. Swenson's reply was a simple, 'All 

 right; we'll go get 'em.' Within half an hour we were on our way to 

 East Cape, Siberia. For he had asked me to go along. The Bear and 

 the Corwin were left in the Nome roadstead. 



"At the very outset, Swenson determined that he would not be 

 handicapped by the lack of men, dogs, umiaks or any other essential 

 Arctic equipment. Arriving at East Cape, therefore, he lost no time 

 in securing an umiak, fifteen natives to haul it over the ice should 

 the King and Winge be blocked as the Bear had been, and some dogs. 

 The umiak, he knew, being light and covered with walrus hide, could 

 be dragged over the ice by the natives, launched in the open water 

 beyond, dragged over the next field, launched again, and the process 

 continued for twenty or a hundred miles if necessary. Swenson, in this 

 instance of foresight as in many other details of the rescue, deserves 

 the greatest credit. He not only risked his ship and her valuable cargo 

 of furs, but he risked his life and the lives of his men to carry out 

 this humanitarian effort. 



"In the six hundred-mile trip from Nome to Wrangel Island we 

 saw no ice for the first four hundred miles. Then we began to see 

 scattered floes, some of them containing walrus that would have yielded 

 Swenson thousands of dollars had he stopped the ship to kill them. 

 But he realized that delay might mean death to those helpless human 

 beings he had come so far to find. The possibility of having one's 

 ship crushed by the ice which we now encountered, or frozen in for the 

 winter was not pleasant to contemplate. But so far as I know, the 

 *fuU speed ahead' order which he gave Captain Jochimsen on leaving 



