FOKEWOKP 



THE following pages contain a copy of my diary as written dur- 

 ing the summer of 1926. Since at the time I had no idea that it 

 ever would be printed, I took little trouble with the style and gram- 

 mar. In general each day was written up just before "turning in" for the 

 night and too often anything that came into my head was put down 

 just to fill the page. I can well remember my cabin mates turning 

 their faces towards the inside of their bunk and politely saying that 

 my light would not keep them awake, but I am perfectly sure that 

 neither of them ever got to sleep before the scratching of my pen 

 had stopped and a final blow had extinguished the small oil lamp. 

 They deserve the highest praise as there is nothing more annoying 

 than somebody puttering around the cabin of a small boat when 

 you are doing your best to get to sleep, especially when he is so 

 foolish as to be writing a diary. 



A word about the schooner herself might be appropriate. She was 

 built last winter in Shelburne, Nova Scotia, by W. C. McKay and 

 Sons, who make a business of building fishing-schooners for local 

 use. They deserve much praise, not only for building so quickly, 

 but also for producing such a stout, able boat. The "Chance" is a 

 typical product of Nova Scotia, long and low, but with plenty of 

 draft and a good turn of speed. Her dimensions are, length, yy 

 feet on deck, beam 16 feet, and draft 11 feet 6 inches. Her dis- 

 placement is only 37 tons. We used a 40 horse-power Lathrop 

 gasoline engine for our auxiliary and this was geared directly to the 

 deck winch by which our 400 fathoms of wire could be lowered and 

 raised. A more sea-worthy little boat could hardly be mkde. 



The object of the trip was first, to secure data on the upper part 

 of the Labrador current and second, to find out as much as possible 

 about the fauna and flora of the Torngat region of Labrador. The 

 advisor of the expedition was Dr. Henry Bigelow of the Museum of 

 Comparative Zoology at Harvard. He not only supplied us with 



