CHAPTER IIPoint Barrow
We were all aboard the steam whaler “Astrum” in the spring of the next year, and with us a marvel of compact maritime construction, our naphtha launch “Pluto”. Hopkins suggested the name on the satisfactory ground that we were likely to have “a hell of a time.” We had worked ourselves up to the most supreme height of confidence and enthusiasm. The Professor was in a sort of demented state of expectation; Hopkins furiously asserted the name of Christopher Columbus would now be forgotten in the new fame to be allotted to us, “the Arctic Argonauts,” and finally Goritz and myself succumbed to a peculiar feeling of predestination.
Captain Coogan of the “Astrum” knew nothing of our proposed destination. It was a stipulation made by Hopkins that nothing on that point was to be discussed, until we reached Point Barrow—if we were to reach it—and the services of Captain Coogan and his selected crew—not the usual polyglot assemblage of ethnic odds and ends—were unconditionally ours up to that moment. The temptations of whaling were to be absolutely eschewed until we had vanished into the fogs and wilderness of the ice pack, beyond whose trackless waste lay Krocker Land. Of course a sea dog like Captain Coogan, a clever and hardy mate like IsaacStanwix, a pertinacious thinker like the engineer Bell Phillips, and such an experienced and avaricious reader as the carpenter Jack Spent (he had made ten trips to Point Barrow) could make pretty shrewd guesses as to our intentions. The stores and supplies, the sledges and kayaks, splendid vehicles of travel made under Goritz’s supervision, were informing enough, had it not been for the disconcerting secrecy of the actors in this strange new ice-drama. I think we were regarded as a “parcel of wild devils or fools,” though I think too, with the exception of perhaps the Professor, our physical constants were impressive.
Our departure did not escape public notice. We were besieged by reporters, but we were impenetrable, and yet we were genially communicative too. It was the Arctic or bowhead whale we were interested in; we were naturalists, the Professor was hoping to introduce the bowhead whale into European waters; just now a preliminary study of its habits, habitat, food, breeding grounds, and commercial availability was indispensable. That fiction sufficed. The remarkable launch prepared for us was made into a skillful adjunct to our investigations. We were honored by several columns of interviews in the dailies, and the splash of our adventure spread its circle of disturbance even to Washington, whence official offers of assistance and participation were received which—were never answered. Among our visitors, for we did not escape the invasion of sightseers, was that Goliah, Carlos Huerta, from whose branding iron you saved me.
(Erickson spoke this measuredly and calmly to be sure, but his hands covered his face, and I saw his body sway, convulsed by his emotion.)
“This man somehow appealed to me; perhaps it was his herculean dimensions. He was familiarwith launches and machinery, and was very intelligent; forceful, too. His suavity disarmed suspicion, and his robust, seemingly ingenuous interest pleased me. Almost his last words, before we sailed, invited me to come to see him—he handed me his card—and to tell him “all about it.” It was a curious, inexplicable divination on his part that I should have much to tell. That man, Mr. Link, was the most ruthless scoundrel I ever met; he was my first scoundrel; because I had never met a scoundrel before I fell into his net.
(Again a pause. It lasted so long that I feared some complication of feeling had robbed him of his memory. I said “And Mr. Erickson, you left San Francisco?” His consciousness returned, and he turned to me smiling.)
Yes, we left San Francisco about the end of April, a dull day with fog banks lifting and falling over the Golden Gate, while a rising storm outside was turning the ocean into water alps, smiting the clouds. Our course was almost a direct line to Behring Straits; we were to pass through the channel between Unalaska and Uninak Islands, then coast the Pribylof Islands for the benefit of the Professor, reach Indian Point, on the Siberian side of the strait where some of the natives, Masinkers (Tchouktchis), could be seen, then cross to Port Clarence on the Alaskan shore for an inspection of the Nakooruks (Innuits); then two stops for the benefit of Hopkins and Goritz. We also intended to secure at the latter place dogs for our dash over the ice to the Krocker Land shore from Point Barrow. Captain Coogan recommended a stop at Cape Prince of Wales where further ethnological notes might be gathered, but this was overruled as both the Professor and Hopkins expected to visit the coal beds beyond Point Hope, and Cape Lisburne in the Arctic Ocean.
We came abreast of Pribylof about May sixth, stalled off St. Paul’s Island in a still sea, light southwest winds and rising tide. The Professor was pulled off to the island in the morning; his eagerness to visit these famous fur-seal rookeries being irrepressible. He had talked of little else, in the intervals when we were not discussing our momentous enterprise, but the marvelous stories which old navigators, Captain Scammon and Captain Bryant had told, and the fascinating studies of Elliot. He told us that formerly, in the middle of the nineteenth century and later, these pelagic mammals had swarmed in millions up to these islands, rising from the ocean like a veritable mammal inundation. He told us about the bull seals, how they fought, their tenacity, their endurance, how a bull will fight fifty or sixty battles for the possession of his ample harem of twelve or fifteen cows, and last out to the end of the season, three months perhaps without food, living on his own fat, covered with scars, eyes gouged out, striped with blood; and how the jovial bachelors, not so disconsolate as might be imagined, the “hollus-chickies,” congregate to one side. He said the noise from these monstrous breeding grounds, where thousands of seals are roaring, bleating, calling—mothers, fathers and pups—could be heard, with the wind right, five or six miles to sea. He didn’t expect to see the households developed then—it was too early—but he might have an opportunity to find a few advance bulls on their stations. He found the bulls, and he found an adventure, andwe found him.
It was almost four or five hours after the Professor had left the ship in a yawl rowed by two sailors, that Hopkins, Goritz, and myself followed him in another boat. We saw the yawl on a short beach of sand, with the men sunning themselvesand asleep on the black rocks which hemmed in the little cove. We ran our boat on the sands, the men came strolling toward us, rubbing their eyes and recovering from the inertia of what had been an uninterrupted snooze. When we asked for the Professor they told us he had disappeared, and had ordered them to stay where they were while he pursued his investigations. He certainly was nowhere in sight and a little anxious over his long absence we moved up to the broken rim of rocks which probably separated this retreat from some similar beach on either side.
The elevated cones and ridges of the island could be seen towering up toward the interior in gaunt gray surfaces, on which rested extensive patches of snow. We surmounted the inconsiderable elevation and found it was a broader barrier than we had anticipated, a platform of jagged projecting crests with intervening rocky basins or tables, the whole an extended spur from a black wall of rock, on whose summit were the clustering huts of a native village. On the edges of the rocks hung a few large cakes of ice, and the receding tide had left broken, hummocky masses tilted at various angles over the inclined faces of stone. The scene was chilly and desolate and to add to its lugubrious desolation a fog had slowly drifted in from the sea and was now tortuously rolling down from the highland on the opposite shore to the island. Our search for the missing Professor would have to be hastened.
“The Professor must be found,” said Hopkins. “We shan’t know how to deal with the native Krockerans when we meet ’em, without the Professor. At present he is the only man alive who understands their peculiarities, and as an interpreter he’s bound to prove useful.”
“Of course,” said Goritz, “you don’t think the seals can eat him?”
“They might,” answered Hopkins, “but they could never digest him. It would certainly be a death potion to the venturesome bull who mistook him for food. Likely as not he is now engaged in explaining to an interesting family his plans for the preservation and increase of them and their kindred.”
During this irrelevant badinage I had crossed the rocky flat and reached another cove or gully, headed towards the land by a slope of broken boulders, and floored with sand. We had as yet encountered no seals. Looking beyond this bay I saw on a promontory bounding the distant edge of the beach what seemed like a human figure, or indeed like a group of figures. Watching the objects for a short time I could more clearly distinguish them, and to my astonishment determined that one was a man and the rest some erect animal forms, doubtless seals. The group was at an extreme point on the rocks, and, if the solitary human was the Professor, his only possible retreat from the beleaguering seals would be the water.
I hallooed to my companions, pointing to the distant objects, and hastened forward onto the rock-strewn beach. Goritz and Hopkins struggled over the rough patch of rocks and overtook me.
“Yes, by the lives of all the saints!” cried Hopkins, who had stopped a moment and with shaded eyes was studying the enigmatical figures silhouetted against sea and sky. “It’s the Professor and threebeachmastersapparently bent on his capture, or else drinking in wisdom from his lips. It might just be they’re competing for his services in teaching their prospective families.”
“I can see him waving his hands, it seems to me, and now he’s shooing them with his hat,” exclaimed Goritz. “He’s in something of a fix. Hurry.”
armed men approach a boy surrounded by sealsTHE PROFESSOR AND THE PRIBYLOF SEALS
THE PROFESSOR AND THE PRIBYLOF SEALS
THE PROFESSOR AND THE PRIBYLOF SEALS
We bounded forward, and over the beaten sandraced together, taking quick glances ahead at the now certain embarrassment of our friend. It was indeed the Professor, and his predicament was unmistakable. Amusement however mingled with our anxiety, for as we drew near we could plainly make out that he had taken his hat between his teeth and was violently wagging his head, the absurd appendage of his cap flying up and down producing a very ludicrous effect. It was a serviceable device, however, for the amazed seals had stopped their approaches; their barking or snarling, at first quite audible, had ceased, and they were now attentively regarding the Professor with almost immobile heads.
“Guess,” called out Hopkins between breaths, “they think the Professor is a little dippy, and are reconsidering his engagement as a domestic instructor.”
We were now near enough to attract the Professor’s sight; he hailed us with swinging arms but did not venture to desist from his mandarin-like wig-wagging. The approach to his position was a little difficult, and we suffered some falls. Our advent had attracted the notice of the bulls and they swerved about to receive us, humping their backs, leaping forward on their flippers, and renewing their truculent miauling or barking. We attacked them with stones but their defiance was unchanged, and they lunged and rushed, quite unappalled by our onset. They would retreat almost immediately to their former positions, holding the poor Professor in chancery with an apparent unanimity that kept Goritz laughing, for with every retreat, the Professor would renew his violent gesticulations.
At length Goritz and Hopkins armed with an armful of stones drove in on the biggest of the bulls, and assailed him with such a shower of missiles that his reserve was overcome, and he plunged forward,following them for twenty feet or more. I ran to the Professor and caught his arm, and we got out of the zone of danger, while the momentarily alliedbeachmasters, frustrated from their imprisonment of him, suddenly resented each other’s proximity and after a miscellaneous “mix-up,” as Hopkins called it, shuffled and loped away to their former stations, the chosen spots for their futureseraglios.
With the liberated Professor we sat down on some stool-like fragments inserted in the sand of the beach and heard his story. It was laughable enough and added an unusual trait to the recorded conduct of the big bull seals, usually indifferent to the approach of men. These three indolent, unoccupied forerunners of the great herds that might soon be expected, had actually chased the Professor and, having cornered him on the promontory, had hopelessly besieged him. The Professor had been too much interested or too imprudent. His amiability perhaps had brought him into this unexpected dilemma, for he had gathered up seaweed from the rocks at the edge of the water, and attempted to feed the bulls. They followed him, and their disappointed expectations developed later into the pugnacity that had made him a prisoner.
While he was talking a few more seals emerged from the ocean, lazily hauling themselves on the rocks with that ill-assured clumsiness of motion so strikingly replaced in the water by the greatest grace, agility and speed.
“But Professor,” interrupted Goritz, “what were you doing with your hat?”
The Professor, who had been much ruffled and excited over his encounter, welcomed this inquiry with a restored equanimity.
“Ah! Goritz, that is a contribution to science. On our return I shall call the attention of LloydMorgan and other animal psychologists to this novel observation. Antoine, it has long been known that the rhythmical oscillation of a flexible substance, a rag, hat, towel, banner, exercises a peculiar influence on animals. It will allay the ferocity of a mad dog or alarm him. Color has something to do with it, as instance the red rag which irritates the bull. Now—” here the Professor looked critically at his steamer cap, and may have mentally noted that it was a green and brown Scotch plaid. “Now this influence seems curiously reinforced if the substance or garment is taken in the mouth and shaken.”
The incorrigible Hopkins had again buried his face in his cupped palms.
“No reason that is incontrovertible has been assigned for this, but I assume that it is an appeal to a latentdemonismin animals, which in its later evolution appears asdevil-worshipin aboriginal people. I most fortunately recalled this, and at a critical moment, when I was threatened with the necessity of retreating into the sea—” The poorly repressed vibrations in Hopkins’ body might have been referred to sympathy or—something else. “A quite unnecessary ablution, let us say,” and the Professor smiled benignantly at me, as perhaps the one most gravely interested in his narrative. “I thought of this remarkable device, which I believe has something of the nature of an incantation. The effect was miraculous. This simple gesture held the seals at bay; I think it is quite demonstrable also that there is a physiological basis for their evident stupefaction—the optic nerve. These animals you know have very poor sight—the optic nerve is disturbed and a cerebral vertigo is induced which, like—”
“That settles it,” cried Hopkins, stumbling to his feet with a very red face and hurrying across thesands. “Professor, there’s something worse than seals on this island; there are the U. S. officials, and—I guess they are charmproof.”
“Exactly,” assented the Professor in an absent-minded way, “exactly, but had you gentlemen restrained yourselves a little, I believe I could have advanced an interesting corroboration to a hitherto dimly—”
A gun shot was heard. It evidently came from our men in the adjoining cove and we smothered the Professor’s scientific homily with a shout, and accelerated our departure.
When we reached the boat we found some natives and two resident officials surrounding our men, the former somewhat excited and demonstrative. The officials questioned us and were informed of our purely accidental visit, and with that explanation, as the fog had increased and there were threatening symptoms of a blow, we manned our boats and got away.
Captain Coogan resumed our course, making northwest for Indian Point, amid heavy ice, whose leads were carefully followed until they liberated us in open water, and the immediate danger of being nipped was past. The next morning I was awakened—my room adjoined Hopkins’—by hearing the American reciting in a voice loud enough to justify forcible remonstrance:
“I met my mates in the morning (and Oh, but I am old),Where roaring on the ledges the summer groundswell rolled,I heard them lift the chorus that dropped the breakers’ song,The beaches of Lucannon—two million voices strong,The song of pleasant stations beside the salt lagoons,The song of blowing squadrons that shuffled down the dunesThe song of midnight dances that charmed the sea to flameThe beaches of Lucannon—before the sealers came!”
“I met my mates in the morning (and Oh, but I am old),Where roaring on the ledges the summer groundswell rolled,I heard them lift the chorus that dropped the breakers’ song,The beaches of Lucannon—two million voices strong,The song of pleasant stations beside the salt lagoons,The song of blowing squadrons that shuffled down the dunesThe song of midnight dances that charmed the sea to flameThe beaches of Lucannon—before the sealers came!”
“I met my mates in the morning (and Oh, but I am old),Where roaring on the ledges the summer groundswell rolled,I heard them lift the chorus that dropped the breakers’ song,The beaches of Lucannon—two million voices strong,The song of pleasant stations beside the salt lagoons,The song of blowing squadrons that shuffled down the dunesThe song of midnight dances that charmed the sea to flameThe beaches of Lucannon—before the sealers came!”
“I met my mates in the morning (and Oh, but I am old),
Where roaring on the ledges the summer groundswell rolled,
I heard them lift the chorus that dropped the breakers’ song,
The beaches of Lucannon—two million voices strong,
The song of pleasant stations beside the salt lagoons,
The song of blowing squadrons that shuffled down the dunes
The song of midnight dances that charmed the sea to flame
The beaches of Lucannon—before the sealers came!”
We made Indian Point, or Chaplin, as the settlement is called, in five days, held back by floes and fogs, narrowly escaping a collision with an adventuresome and premature whaler making its way to the same destination. These sailors often get caught in the ice, when they are helpless, and if the pack tightens on them, they are likely to come to grief with a cut stem or a stoved side. We assisted one poor fellow out of such a plight. His vessel was shipping water fast, and we helped shift his load, giving the boat a stern list that lifted its broken nose and allowed him to make repairs.
Chaplin is a small settlement of natives on the Siberian coast, the largest along the line to Behring Straits. There may be some forty huts there, and the whale men find it a convenient place to do a stroke of trade. Indeed, if it were not for their visits the unfortunate Masinkers might resign the job of trying to live at all, as the whales are more scarce than formerly, or more cautious, and walrus and seal scarcely turn in closer than St. Lawrence Island. The village is on a projecting tooth of land—a mere sandpit—and back from the village along the foothills is the curious, disconsolate looking graveyard where the dead are buried in rudely excavated holes and covered with stones and earth, some with deer antlers stuck about as gravestones.
The natives were not slow in coming aboard, and as we had outrun the whalers who are annually expected, their reception of us was, so to speak, enthusiastically hearty. I thought it was a trifle overdone. The entire population tried to getaboard, and assumed possession of everything with such unsophisticated satisfaction that it strained the limits of our hospitality and tired our patience somewhat. They were a jocular, spontaneous and chattering crowd, of all ages, many hues, and some diversity of dress. Each canoe had received from Captain Coogan a bucket of bread, but their appetite for tobacco would have made a tremendous contribution to the income of the United Cigar Company. Everyone wanted it—men, women and children, and it stood first in the commercial schedule of trade. We rejected their whalebone ivory and foxskins, but boots, skin shirts and coats were acceptable.
Our very generous demeanor towards their needs elicited the stormiest approval, but we regretfully learned that it prolonged their occupation of the ship which, so far as fragrance was considered, had seriously declined from its former estate of habitability. Articles of all sorts come handy to these people, but as we were not prepared for their omnivorous demands, tobacco formed the staple of our barter.
Now in our little library, whose usefulness the sustained succession of long days of suspense or idleness had fully demonstrated, we had read in a small light blue book by Herbert L. Aldrich, called “Arctic Alaska and Siberia,” of the author’s visit to this very place. In the book a man, Gohara by name, was designated as “the Masinker of the Masinkers,” a man forty years of age, tall, commanding, and “by far the best specimen mentally and physically of his people.”
We discovered him. He was yet vigorous, though approaching seventy and his remarkable spouse—his third wife then—Siwurka, maintained a supreme position in his household, which the advent, since Aldrich’s visit, of two younger womenhad not disturbed. One of these later accessions to Gohara’s domestic felicity was a person of becoming rotundity, with a distracting tousle of hair that almost covered her eyes. The inexpugnable scientific curiosity of the Professor led him into his second predicament with this young person, which, for a moment, promised to be more serious than his inquisitional visit to the fur seals.
It was the last day of our stay at Indian Point which had been prolonged by the viewless stretches of ice moving out of the Arctic into Behring Sea, and we were all ashore. As usual the Professor deserted us, following out some preconcerted scheme of observation or experiment in which our participation was unnecessary or even resented. It was some hours after we had missed him, and our inspection of thetupicks, the dogs, the children, and the industrial products of the Masinkers was completed, that a large boy, prodigiously magnified by his big boots, rushed upon our trailing group crying:
“Doghter! Doghter! He out of head. Hoopla!”
The fellow was excited and out of breath with running, and his excitement became reflected in the faces of the natives around us, who were helplessly bewildered and looked so.
“It’s the Professor—another row. Hold back the crowd. I’ll go with this screaming lunatic and extricate our distinguished friend. Some scientific escapade, you can bet your hat on it,” whispered Hopkins.
To inquiries of his acquaintances the boy kept up an unintelligible jabber and pointed to the farther side of the village. Apparently the assemblage were on the point of bolting for the spot, in deference to the boy’s ejaculations. Hopkins handed us a package which he had been reserving for some sort of a valedictory to Chaplin and its unsavory population.It was a liberal assortment of quids, smoking tobacco, cigars and snuff, and its exhibition and immediate distribution quelled the flight of the rabble around us, whose inclination to stay where they were instantly hardened like adamant.
Hopkins seized the boy, turned him around, and the two vanished in the direction the boy had indicated. In about half an hour, or less, they returned with the Professor between them, much upset but calm, and apparently indifferent to the objurgations and imprecations, delivered in unvarnished and vigorousTchoukchi, hurled at him by no less a man than Gohara, followed by his five wives, whose voices querulously mingled and reinforced their master’s denunciations. The situation was unquestionably very amusing, very curious, and, except for the fortunate intervention of Hopkins’ miscellaneous propitiations, might have become very annoying. We hurried the Professor to the beach, got into our boats, Hopkins making a stern-wise address to the multitude on the shore, a most grotesque and tumultuous bunch of long, short, thin, fat, smiling, frowning, dark and light figures in skins and fur, and reached the “Astrum,” which that very evening left the offing, and, over a clear, moon-lit sea was directed toward Port Clarence in Alaska. A hard blow was on, and the ice packs had been scattered or driven eastward.
Hopkins’ story that night, after the Professor had retired, which he did unusually early and with a complete resumption of his smile and his good humor, entertained us until after midnight. I abbreviate its windings and prolixity, interspersed with Hopkins’ incommunicable reflexions.
The boy, conveniently named Oolah, led Hopkins some way back of the settlement to atupickof considerable size, and covered with canvas (usually walrus hide or skins form these roofings) which was,it so happened, Gohara’s storehouse, stocked with trading material. Hopkins restrained his guide’s impatience, and finding a convenient aperture for the inspection of the interior peered within. To his delighted astonishment there was the Professor, with notebook and pencil, and near him in placid wonderment, which occasionally broke in smiles or deepened into terror, was the last and, with reservations for taste, most attractive wife of the head trader of Indian Point,Ting-wahby name. The Professor’s performances were immoderately extravagant. Seen in their incongruous environment, combined with their novelty, they compelled Hopkins to retire at intervals and roll on the ground, in order to control the violence of his merriment, another proceeding which strengthened Oolah’s conviction in the immanence of the devil among these strangers.
When Hopkins first descried the Professor, he was standing erect with his arms raised high above his head, close together, the hands in contact, flapping and clapping them in an indescribably funny way, while at intervals he shrank and cowered over as if seized with the insupportable pains of colic. To these antics the woman returned a perplexed stare, as the Professor resumed his normal manner, took up his pad and pencil, and waited apparently for her response, while she, equally expectant, stood stock still and waited for more explicit communications.
Then the Professor suddenly extended his arms in front of him, and wheeled round on his heels, with such commendable agility, that as he spun, his expansive ears seemed almost obliterated. It was then that Hopkins resorted to the refuge of the ground to conceal his feelings. Still the woman was mute, but her face showed a rising fear, andher hands rose to her neck as if to seize something from the skin pouch made in her upper garment.
The Professor left off his physical maneuvers and began a series of grimaces which, as Hopkins expressed it, “would have dimmed the luster of the best vaudeville star he had ever seen.” They expressed almost everything, beginning with something that might be called suffering, to a terrible excruciation of joy, when the Professor exerted his features to a degree that Hopkins called “the limit of facial agony.” And yet the girl was silent, but her eyes never left the Professor, and Hopkins, and Oolah too, saw her quietly draw a knife from her “bread basket.” Hopkins might not have observed this if Oolah had not grunted, “Stick ’im.”
He felt then it was time to intervene, but his interest and curiosity—“better’n a show” he repeated over and over again—had up to this point prevented him.
Suddenly the Professor desisted from his rapid play of expression, and began to moan diabolically, rolling towards the woman with supplicating arms. The knife flashed, it was upraised, and the girl crouched, her face darkening with either rage or terror. The next moment she had sprung at the now observant and terror-stricken Professor, who executed a flank movement—“side-stepped” Hopkins put it—and was out of the door and—into the protecting embrace of Hopkins’ arms, while Oolah with precocious intelligence intercepted Ting-wah. The girl’s pent-up emotions spent themselves in screams and fervent but barbarous complaints that brought Gohara and his other spouses to her rescue. Hopkins, utterly mystified by the Professor’s exhibition, resorted to the very plausible explanation, suggested by Oolah in the first place, that the Professor had gone crazy, which indeed he most apostolically believed himself. This answered thepurpose, though it did not repress Gohara and his family from uttering a string of uncomplimentary epithets which might have provoked a serious disturbance had it not been for Hopkins’ tact and the celerity of our retreat. Gohara’s rage followed our boat with stridulous recriminations.
The Professor was noticeably crestfallen and almost sullenly indifferent to our questions as to what had happened. It was only a few days later, when his spirits had become thoroughly restored, that he spoke about it, with a sudden assumption of confidence that delighted us.
“My friends,” the Professor began one cold, radiant afternoon as we were ranged round the naphtha launch admiring its adaptation, strength, the happy conception of structural ice runners let into her keel, the easily unshipped tiller and screw; “My friends, the theories of the origin of language have been various; there are the views of Geiger as to its inception in movement and action, those of Noire as to the importance of sound, onomatopoetic or imitative, and the value of expression, as with Darwin.”
“You see,” he continued with a fine indirection of reference, which we appreciated, “I was before an untutored child of nature. I attempted, along these various lines of non-verbal intercourse to secure an illuminative response that might throw some light upon theory. Under the circumstances, the subject, vitiated I think by contact with European culture—Ah—”
“Shied” suggested Hopkins.
“Well,” the Professor smilingly concluded, “there was certainly anhiatus. Her aboriginal powers of interpretation were dulled—dulled—perhaps extinguished.”
“But Professor, you woke up a good deal of oratory. In fact, Professor, you’re nervy and—ifI may be permitted the vulgarity of quotation—
‘You would joke with hyenas, returning their stareWith an impudent wag of your head,And you went to walk, paw-in-paw, with a bear,“Just to keep up its spirits,” you said.Without rest or pause—while those frumious jawsWent savagely snapping around—You skipped and you hopped and you floundered and floppedTill fainting you fell to the ground.’”
‘You would joke with hyenas, returning their stareWith an impudent wag of your head,And you went to walk, paw-in-paw, with a bear,“Just to keep up its spirits,” you said.Without rest or pause—while those frumious jawsWent savagely snapping around—You skipped and you hopped and you floundered and floppedTill fainting you fell to the ground.’”
‘You would joke with hyenas, returning their stareWith an impudent wag of your head,And you went to walk, paw-in-paw, with a bear,“Just to keep up its spirits,” you said.Without rest or pause—while those frumious jawsWent savagely snapping around—You skipped and you hopped and you floundered and floppedTill fainting you fell to the ground.’”
‘You would joke with hyenas, returning their stare
With an impudent wag of your head,
And you went to walk, paw-in-paw, with a bear,
“Just to keep up its spirits,” you said.
Without rest or pause—while those frumious jaws
Went savagely snapping around—
You skipped and you hopped and you floundered and flopped
Till fainting you fell to the ground.’”
The Professor passed his hand approvingly over the side of the launch, ignoring the jibe. We dropped the subject, indeed forgot it, listening to Goritz’s animated and assuring praise of the little craft that would introduce us to a new continent, and the incident was never again heard of.
Our next haven was Port Clarence in Alaska, and we had a lot of trouble making it. The ice streaming out of Behring Straits was thick, and, as the Yankee put it, “numerous.” The captain and mates were keen to watch their chances, and we often found ourselves surrounded by blocks that the wind threatened to pack together to our imminent peril. It was very early, and whereas the whalers make Port Clarence about midsummer we expected or hoped to get to Point Barrow about that time. A northwest wind came up and scattered the ice and gave us an open sea, though we were compelled to make some long detours around white meadows of snow-covered ice, that slipped off into the recesses of low, cold fogs and suggested illimitable barriers ahead of us.
The distant rattling or caking sound of grinding ice was sometimes constantly heard for hours, and again vast fields, looking almost motionless, loomedup with the sun shimmering their surfaces into an endless complexity of mirrors. Along the indented or hummocky edges of these little continents we would steam serenely and exult courageously in the thought of crossing just such white ways to the hidden wonders of a hidden world. We often fell into fits of dreaming, buoyed up by the calm and glowing vaticinations of the Professor.
We finally brought up at the port and received a tumultuous reception, having outrun the whaling fleet. The natives,Nakooruks, crowded aboard, and were intently watched but quite passively shunned by the Professor. Water and wood were taken on here, and about one hundred selected dogs, whose points were minutely inspected or determined by Goritz and myself. It was June, and already flowers spun their colored webs over the inhospitable shores, compensating for their brief life here in the north by a marvelous abundance. Yellow, white and blue, the bewitching patches of moss-blue flowering hepatica, forget-me-not, anemone, phlox and daisy charmed us, and for a moment brought back such a flood of memories that a surge of homesickness swept over us, the last tug of the pleasant world we had turned our backs on before the portals of a stranger world opened and closed on us, perhaps forever.
We bought fish and furs from the natives who had traveled hither with their pelts and offerings from Norton Sound, Cape Prince of Wales, and King’s Island. There was confusion and bustle on shore, and on board the barking of dogs, guttural controversies among the Eskimos, wailing of babies, orders, the shriek of the donkey engine hauling on cargo, produced a pleasant excitement which attained its climax on the arrival of the United States revenue cutter. Visiting of the captains, exchange of news followed, and we were told thatthe season was unprecedented; the ice in the Arctic had broken up early, there was a clear passage in the straits and an audacious whaler had attempted the passage and “skinned” through to Point Hope. We were sanguine of reaching Point Barrow early in July.
On the fourth of July we were under Cape Lisburne, encountering the rush of the wind that seems harbored by that lofty cliff, and which like a physical avalanche pushed us over until the water rippled over the lee rail. Along the shores everywhere there was a broad avenue of open water, stretching from the skirt of shore ice to the heavy packs, sheeted with fogs and murmurously moaning, inimitably flooring that mysterious ocean whose furthest waters beat on the shores of Krocker Land.
From Cape Lisburne the shore line strikes at a right angle to the Corwin coal fields, the low shores, except for a few occasional interruptions, as with Cape Lisburne itself, marking the margins of the higher uplands in the interior. Salt lagoons, crescent shaped beaches, sandpits, shoal basins, furnish a monotonous succession of flattened, uninteresting features, which practically reaches to Point Barrow. At the Corwin coal beds slate, sandstone and conglomerate overlie each other, and the Mesozoic age of the beds themselves is established. Here the Professor emerged from the mental coma which had suspended his pedagogic enthusiasms since we left Indian Point, and a few fern leaf fossils unlocked again the storehouse of his learning and loosened his tongue with eloquent predictions.
Standing up at our mess table with a beautifully preserved fern leaf, sketched in black interlacings, reticulations and frondy leaflets on an ashen-colored slate, the Professor spoke to us, and indeed we ourselves felt the thrill of a reconstructed world in thisbleak land, as we saw this silent token of former warmth.
“My friends,” he held up the fossil leaf, “here is a vestige of the past, a leaf of a fern. It tells us of hot, moist, heat-oppressed cycles of years, when marshes densely thicketed with tree fern, swollen with hot rains, drenched in a perspiration of mists, covered these now arid snow-blanketed flats; when a reptilian life, the consonant faunal response to these climatic conditions flourished here also, when, dropping into the bayous and ponds, leaf upon leaf, branches, spores and trunks of an expanded filicine flora built up the masses of vegetable debris in later ages, to become consolidated and transformed into coal and—” the Professor’s eyes started, his inherent smile became a portentous stare, and the wide ears seemed almost to converge to catch his own words of promise; “and—we shall rediscover a warm or temperate climate here at the North Pole. WHY?”
His voice spoke this interrogation in something like a squeal, so that the answer, in its unaffected profundity, produced a really dramatic climax.
“Because we shall be nearer the center of the earth.”
We took on coal at the Corwin mines and resumed our progress northward in the still unimpeded lane of open water, with porridge ice forming fast along the outer pack but the shore rim intact, and bucking against a strong northeast current setting along shore. We passed Point Lay and Icy Cape the second day, and reached Point Barrow on the tenth of July.
How well I recall our landing on the low beach of this tip-top point of the continent, and wondering, in a dreary dream of coming hardships and dangers, at its desolation, a low barren sandbank forty to one hundred yards across. At Cape Smythe a small promontory raises a faint remonstranceagainst the encroachments of the sea in a bluff of about thirty feet elevation, and here we found the village of Uglaamie, a cluster of twenty or more huts, inhabited by a boreal tribe, theNuwukmeun. Life however, in the plants and animals revived our feelings, and the Professor’s exultation over the traces of old beach lines inspirited us. Here on the land, in propitious spots, sprang up buttercups, dandelions and a peculiar poppy; over our heads flew flocks of eider ducks, a butterfly danced gayly in its wavering flight by our side, and Captain Coogan reported a school of whale running to the northeast, “in a hurry.”
We found some standing portions of the United States meteorological station placed here in 1902, and Goritz stumbled upon a dismantled graveyard where saint and sinner, rich and poor had promiscuously suffered from the inroads of the Eskimo dog. It offered a mournful commentary upon the transitoriness of human greatness.
But reflections were out of place; we had reached the point of departure, and the Great Unknown sternly invited us to begin our quest. Under such circumstances the long subdued instincts of the primal man reassert themselves, and an augury of good fortune befell us that was droll enough, unrelieved by the nervous solemnity of our feelings, but which so connected itself with these as to give it an absurd stateliness of meaning.
An angora goat was the queer and unexpected waif we found here, left by an unlucky whaler the previous year; a long haired, pugnacious billy goat, whose property or power as a mascot had failed to save the “Siren” from being “nipped, pooped and swamped,” and lost in the remorseless ice. The resident Eskimos in Uglaamie had imbibed respect for the goat (which had been somewhat summarily abandoned by its former devotees) and its influencewith the unseen agencies that control destiny. But they were logical enough to conclude that its intimacy was with bad—tuna—rather than with good spirits. This omnivorous beast furnished us with a favorable omen, all the more auspicious because he embodied the very genius of destruction.
Now this expatriated goat rejected the prostrations and worship of the Nuwukmeun, like a capricious deity, and perversely clung to us with embarrassing insistence. The launch had been put in the water; it seemed almost ideal in its qualities, it shot through the water, it turned at a suggestion; its mobility, its steadiness, its comfortable size, its ample deck room, the large capacity of its storage tanks, its strength and sinewy stiffness delighted us. With this, and with propitious chances, we could follow leads, narrow and crooked, mount the ice, and make of it a giant sled, to resume at an instant’s notice its natural home and so circumvent all treacheries of ice or water, with protean ease sailing on each.
Lost in his admiration of his creation, as it rose and rocked in a low swell at the side of the whaler, Goritz stood on the shore and forgot his priceless chronometer which, wrapped in a red flannel rag, he had for a moment placed on the sand. The rest of us were not far from him, but might have failed to detect the imminent danger, when suddenly the Professor clapping his hands together in vigorous whacks, shouted,
“Antoine! Antoine! The goat, the goat; the chronom—”
The sentence remained incomplete. Like a flash Goritz had wheeled about, to see his hircine holiness, with insufferable assurance, pick up in his tremulous lips the precious watch. If Goritz turned like lightning, his attack on the offender was even a trifle quicker. He caught the beast by thethroat, determined to intercept the descent of the timekeeper into the intricate passages of the god’s intestines. There was a struggle, the goat falling over on its back and kicking with might and main, while Goritz inexorably tightened his constricting grip on the animal’s wind-pipe. There could be but one of two results—a dead goat or the recovered chronometer, and, of course, it was the latter.
The choking mascot, with an expiring effort, gagged, and shot the uninjured instrument, still swathed in its red envelope, from his mouth. The fallen god’s subjects were at hand also, a little bewildered over their deity’s predicament. When the reparation, on the part of the goat, was made, Goritz released him, kicked him, and the humiliated tuna turned tail and incontinently bolted for the nearest igloo, and—tell it not in Gath—the affair was construed as a “good sign.”
It was the eve of the day appointed for our northward advance. Captain Coogan invited the officers of another recently arrived whaler aboard, and spread a generous banquet for us, which involved the last resources of his larder and pantry, and really seemed sumptuous. I think we all felt a little overawed, or indeed a good deal so, by the tremendous exploit we were embarking on. That night the midnight sun shone strangely along the horizon upon the waste of northern ice, illimitable, roseate, inscrutable, the white cerement of a dead continent, and that dead continent the one we hoped to reach alive! Would we?
There were speeches, toasts, stories, impromptu songs (Goritz played well on a mandolin and sang some courage-inspiring ballads of Scandinavia, and Hopkins could “warble” as he called it, quite pleasingly) and we were wished “good luck” a thousand times. Still we felt the restraint of an overhanging mysterious fate, and all that Cooganor Isaac Stanwix, or Bell Phillips, or Jack Spent, or the newly arrived friends from Alaska, could contrive to express of cheer and encouragement—and the verbal part of the contrivance was rather limited and monotonous—failed to dispel our solemnity or the inner sense of serious misgiving. We laughed indeed when Hopkins told the story of the goat, the chronometer and the goat’s abrupt contrition under Goritz’s forcible persuasion. Hopkins concluded that it reminded him of an incident “at home” narrated as follows in verse:
“There was a man named Joseph CableWho bought a goat just for his stable,One day the goat, prone to dine,Ate a red shirt right off the line.“Then Cable to the goat did say:‘Your time has come; you’ll die this day’And took him to the railroad track,And bound him there upon his back.“The train then came; the whistle blew,And the goat knew well his time was due;But with a mighty shriek of painCoughed up the shirt and flagged the train.”
“There was a man named Joseph CableWho bought a goat just for his stable,One day the goat, prone to dine,Ate a red shirt right off the line.“Then Cable to the goat did say:‘Your time has come; you’ll die this day’And took him to the railroad track,And bound him there upon his back.“The train then came; the whistle blew,And the goat knew well his time was due;But with a mighty shriek of painCoughed up the shirt and flagged the train.”
“There was a man named Joseph CableWho bought a goat just for his stable,One day the goat, prone to dine,Ate a red shirt right off the line.
“There was a man named Joseph Cable
Who bought a goat just for his stable,
One day the goat, prone to dine,
Ate a red shirt right off the line.
“Then Cable to the goat did say:‘Your time has come; you’ll die this day’And took him to the railroad track,And bound him there upon his back.
“Then Cable to the goat did say:
‘Your time has come; you’ll die this day’
And took him to the railroad track,
And bound him there upon his back.
“The train then came; the whistle blew,And the goat knew well his time was due;But with a mighty shriek of painCoughed up the shirt and flagged the train.”
“The train then came; the whistle blew,
And the goat knew well his time was due;
But with a mighty shriek of pain
Coughed up the shirt and flagged the train.”
When all was over, and everyone had gone to bed or bunk, and dreams, I stole out alone on the deck of the “Astrum” and “thought it over.” The Arctic silence weighed upon me like an ominous portent; the dusky sun rolling its flaming orb along the western horizon (it was two o’clock past midnight) sent shafts of bronzy light over the rubbled ice fields that returned a twilight glow, and along the horizon on either side of the sun, low down, burned a spectral conflagration. It was clear, the wind blew, and chafing sounds, that may have been roars from where they emanated, but came to me ashoarse whispers, rose northward, as if spirits spoke.
I remembered how Oolah, the Eskimo, explained Peary’s success in reaching the pole; he said “the devil is asleep or having trouble with his wife, or we should never have come back so easily.” I devoutly prayed that domestic turmoil in the household of his satanic majesty might again prove distracting.
But to penetrate that vast icy solidity with a naphtha launch! It seemed like trying to break one’s way through a glacier with an ice pick. I recalled the fable of the Pied Piper when at the “mighty top” of Koppelberg Hill: