CAPTAIN BARTLETT’S COPY OF THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM“My own constant companion, which I have never tired of reading,was the ‘Rubáiyát’ of Omar Khayyam.This book I have carried with me everywhere.”
CAPTAIN BARTLETT’S COPY OF THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM“My own constant companion, which I have never tired of reading,was the ‘Rubáiyát’ of Omar Khayyam.This book I have carried with me everywhere.”
CAPTAIN BARTLETT’S COPY OF THE RUBÁIYÁT OF OMAR KHAYYAM
“My own constant companion, which I have never tired of reading,was the ‘Rubáiyát’ of Omar Khayyam.This book I have carried with me everywhere.”
TheKarlukhad a good library and we saved a number of books which enabled some of us to catch up a little on our reading. We read such books as “Wuthering Heights,” “Villette,” and “Jane Eyre,” besides more recent novels. My own constant companion, which I have never tired of reading, was the “Rubáiyát” of Omar Khayyam. I have a leather-bound copy of this which was given me by Charles Arthur Moore, Jr., who, with Harry Whitney and a number of other Yale friends of his, was with me on a hunting trip in Hudson’s Bay on the sealerAlgerinein 1901. This book I have carried with me everywhere since then, until now, if it had not been repaired in various places by surgeon’s plaster, I believe it would fall to pieces. I have had it with me on voyages to South America and other foreign parts on sailing vessels when I was serving my years of apprenticeship to get my British master’s certificate in 1905; on both of my trips with Peary as captain of theRoosevelt; on my trip to Europe with Peary after the attainment of the North Pole; on a hunting trip in the Arctic on theBoeothicin the summer of 1910, when we brought home the musk-oxen and the polar bear, Silver King, to the Bronx Park Zoo in NewYork; on various sealing trips; and now the self-same copy was with me on theKarlukand afterwards on my journey to bring about the rescue of our ship’s company. I have read it over and over again and never seem to tire of it. Perhaps it is because there is something in its philosophy which appeals to my own feeling about life and death. For all my experience and observation leads me to the conclusion that we are to die at the time appointed and not before; this is, I suppose, what is known as fatalism.
On the night of the fourteenth the dogs had a fight and one of them was killed. We could ill afford to lose him, for dogs were at a premium with us, now.
On the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth the weather was threatening; the sky was overcast and the wind from the north and northeast, with temperatures not far from forty below zero. The sewing continued busily. On the sixteenth we overhauled our Primus stoves, of which we had two of the Swedish and eight of the Lovett pattern. We also reckoned the amount of oil necessary for them and found that an imperial gallon, which would fill a stove three and a half times, would make tea twice a day for fourteen days. The imperial or English gallon is larger than the American gallon; ten gallons English would mean a littlemore than twelve gallons American, according to our measurements, for we had bought the oil in Nome according to the American measure and now in transferring it to our handy containers we used the English measure. I have known this difference between English and American gallons to make a good deal of trouble for skippers buying supplies in foreign ports.