What did I do when I got back, did you say? Well, after the sinking of
the _Andalusian_ my folks thought I ought to be willing to give up the
sea and confine my adventures to Montclair, the Lackawanna Railroad and
New York, and they urged me to settle down and sell engines, or get into
some other kind of business in the big town and commute like the rest of
the suburbanites.
I tried it for a few months but the air is dead on land and it stifles
me like poison-gas when I breathe it, and besides, I kept hearing the
call of the sea oftener and oftener and louder and louder just as though
a spook mermaid were holding a conch shell to my ear.
Well, sir, there were just no two ways about it. I was not cut out for a
salesman but I could handle a key with the best of them. So one bright
day--it was the first of March--when dad told me to go out and see a
_prospect_ who wanted a 40 horsepower crude oil engine, I made one stone
kill two sparrows and after fencing with the would-be buyer for half an
hour I slipped over to the _Lord’s Court Building_ where the _Marconi
Company_ had their offices and talked with my friend Sammis, the Chief
Engineer.
“No, there isn’t anything you’d want just now,” he reflected. “There’s a
couple of new ships building in Belfast for the _Cunard Line_ and one of
them will be launched in a couple of months. I might be able to get a
berth for you on her.”
“I want to go right now if I go at all,” I told him, for the land ached
in my bones like the old Harry and I knew the only way I could get
relief was to go to sea.
“How would you like to go on a seal catching expedition to the Arctic?
It ought to be a pretty good health trip for an overworked salesman. The
_Polar Bear_ and _Midnight Sun_ sail in a couple of weeks from St.
Johns, Newfoundland, to be gone for a month or so and the pay is double
that of any operator in the transatlantic service. I have just shipped
an operator named Mackey up there and gave him the post on the _Midnight
Sun_ so you’ll have company, for they will sail together. If you’ll take
it I’ll try to get you a good berth in the meantime.”
“To the Arctic,” I ejaculated. “Well, Sammis, this is a voyage I’ll have
to sleep over, but it sounds good to me. I’ll let you know in the
morning.”
There wasn’t the slightest doubt in my mind but that I’d take it but I
didn’t know exactly what my folks would say about it, for their idea was
that they had had enough of my going to sea and they further thought
that I ought now to be perfectly satisfied to stay on land for the rest
of my natural life.
Do you know that when I stepped out of the _Lord’s Court Building_ after
having signed up the next day I could feel the stone sidewalk rolling
under me like the deck of a ship and that the putrid air of Wall Street
smelled as if it had a dash of sea salt in it. That’s how great I felt.
Dad would have to get some one else to sell his engines--it was the
Arctic for me!
[Illustration: WE WERE CATCHING SEALS BY WIRELESS!]
On arriving at St. Johns I at once hunted up Captain James of the _Polar
Bear_ and handed him my commission. _And such a captain he was!_ He
looked a different race of seafaring men from the captains I had seen in
the regular Atlantic service.
His grizzled hair and beard and clear, keen eyes were gray; that part of
his face which showed was about two shades lighter than the color of
dried walrus meat and with his silence--except when any of the crew
failed in his duties--you would have known, even if you’d met him on
Broadway, that his home was somewhere inside the Arctic Circle. He
turned me over to his first mate who also looked as if he had a heart of
oak and would be equal to any duty he might be called on to perform if
it was north of latitude 75 degrees, the latitude at St. Johns.
_And, oh, the crew!_ They were cutters of the old school, every one of
them. I had no idea that sailors of their kind were to be found anywhere
at this time here on earth except in song and story, but there they
actually were all about me in the living flesh. There was an air about
them that told as plainly as spoken words they had weathered many a
polar storm and that now, even at St. Johns, they were way too far south
of the bleak, frozen regions to be in their element.
_And say, the ship!_ She was a beaut of the old wooden kind, not a whole
lot to look at, but built to stand the strains of furious gales as well
as the tremendous pressures of the ice packs. Indeed, she had been one
of Commander Peary’s ships which had been farthest north when that
explorer sought to find the North Pole some years before.
The wireless apparatus and I were the only objects on the ship that
seemed not to belong to her, but when we reached the sealing grounds we
found ourselves and helped in the catch, thereby making friends with the
Captain and his crew.
The transmitter was formed of a single ten inch induction coil which was
energized by a current of the ship’s dynamo. The receiver was of the
regular Marconi type with a magnetic detector. The masts of the _Polar
Bear_ were only fifty feet apart and an aerial made up of half-a-dozen
wires swung between them.
Whoever installed the equipment stopped at the aerial for there was no
_ground_. It was no small job to get a decent _ground_ for the ship, as
I have said before, was an old-timer and had a wooden hull. Now where a
ship has a steel hull all you’ve got to do to make a _ground_ is to
simply connect the ground wire to a water pipe, or any other metal part
of the ship, for these lead to the steel hull; as the hull sets in the
water the very best kind of a _ground_ is had without any trouble to get
it. But what’s to be done when there’s nothing but an old-fashioned
wooden hull between your instruments and the water? The way I did it was
to run a wire from the instruments down to the engine room; then the
assistant engineer fixed a 6 x 6 x 24 inch block of wood parallel with
and close to the propeller shaft; this done we screwed a copper _brush_,
that is a strip of stiff sheet copper, to the block so that it pressed
flat on and hard against the shaft.
Under the head of one of the screws I looped the free end of my ground
wire and screwed it down tight. This made a good enough ground
connection through the shaft and the propeller keyed to it which was
submerged in the water. With this transmitter, aerial and ground, I
could cover 100 miles or so when the conditions were favorable.
Everything was hustle and bustle on board and all around us, for at that
time of the year--it was nearing the middle of March--a score or more of
ships steam from St. Johns along the great Labrador Coast to the frozen
north where the young _harp seals_ are found by the thousands on the ice
floes off the coast.
Of all the ships at St. Johns I saw only one other that was fitted with
an aerial and when I got my apparatus in order I made my way over to her
to see Mackey, her operator.
In days gone by the sealing ships were all schooners and just as these
gave way to wooden steamers so the latter will be supplanted by ships
with steel hulls, and the _Midnight Sun_ was the first of these fine new
steel craft. For size and power she put it all over the _Polar Bear_,
but she lacked the glamor of romance and for this reason I liked my ship
the best.
I had met Mackey, her operator, at Liverpool once and we straightway
became better acquainted. He told me that the firm who owned the _Polar
Bear_ also owned the _Midnight Sun_ and that the Captains of them were
to work together. A new experiment was to be tried, he said, and that
was to catch seals by wireless, but what the _modus operandi_ of the
scheme was he hadn’t the faintest idea and no more had I. I remember
when I was a little boy that folks talked about running street cars by
electricity and I wondered how it could be done. I had a kind of a vague
notion that a chunk of electricity came along, struck the car and pushed
it ahead just as a breeze fills the sails of a ship and carries her
for’ard.
In after years I learned that the current of electricity flowed along a
wire parallel with the tracks and that it passed from this feeder to the
trolley of a car, thence down a conductor to a motor which it energized
and finally back to the power house through the rails; further that it
was the power of the motor thus developed which drove the wheels of the
car; and I was disappointed, for it seemed to me to be altogether too
round-about a way--too far-fetched--to justify the statement that the
“car runs by electricity.”
The same thing holds good when you see signs which read, “_hats cleaned
by electricity_,” “_eggs hatched by electricity_,” and “_diamonds made
by electricity_,” for the hat is merely rotated by an electric motor,
the eggs are hatched in an incubator which is heated by a current
flowing through a wire, and the diamonds are made in an electric
furnace.
Now catching seals by wireless was to my mind quite a vague, mysterious
and altogether a difficult proposition to see into--even as running a
car by electricity was when I was a little shaver. Seals are wonderful
creatures, as you will admit if you ever saw them do a balancing act in
a show, and I have heard that they have a great liking for music. A seal
hunter can take a phonograph, put a band record on it, set it up where
there is a patch of seals and start it going. The seals will come out of
the water to listen to the sweet strains and every time one puts its
nose above the surface the hunter, who is lying a little way off, will
shoot it with his rifle. This then is what you might call _hunting seals
with music_.
It looked to me as if we might be told to send out a line of wireless
waves to a patch of seals, bend up the ends of a few dashes and when the
seals had swallowed them the sailors would heave ho and pull them
aboard. But no, catching seals by wireless was not done in quite so
direct a fashion, as you will presently see.
We only made one stop after we left St. Johns and that was at
Cartwright, near the mouth of the Hamilton River, on the bleak coast of
Labrador. And wireless, let me say right here, has been a big factor in
changing life, such as it is, in this wild, forbidding country.
Labrador, you know, is a narrow strip of coastland along the edge of the
province of Quebec. It is from 10 to 50 miles wide, but a thousand miles
long, reaching from Belle Isle Strait which separates the lower end of
it from Newfoundland to Hudson Strait which lies within the Arctic
Circle.
The inhabitants live only on the coast and these are made up chiefly of
Eskimos in the north and Indians in the south, and all along and in
between are trappers, fishermen and _live yeres_. The trappers push into
the interior a little way to run their lines of traps and in the spring
of the year thousands of fishermen come up from Newfoundland to take the
cod-fish, which abound off the coast at this season of the year. If you
ask one of the poor, ignorant white inhabitants about himself he will
say that he _lives yere_, hence the nick-name of this fixed part of the
population. The condition of all these poor, simple folk has been much
improved by wireless.
For many years the mail-boat was the only steamer that made calls at all
the ports along the coast and she did this about every six months. If
any one wanted to get something from St. Johns he had to know it a long
way ahead of time and even when he was thoughtful enough to order it the
chances are that by the time it reached him he had forgotten he had
ordered it or had gotten over wanting it.
On the mail-boat there was a doctor and the inhabitants had to wait to
get sick until he came, or perhaps, it would be stating the case a
little more accurately to say that however ill they might be they had to
wait until he came before they could be treated. Anything might and
often did happen to his patients between calls. But all this has been
changed by wireless which now links up the towns along the coast with
Battle Harbor where the _Royal Deep Sea Mission_ has its hospital for
fishermen, and not only may supplies be ordered but, what is of far
greater importance, the sick may have their diseases diagnosed and
medicine prescribed though they are as far away as Maine, by the doctor
in charge and all in the twinkling of an electric wave.
As we steamed up the coast the ice fields began to loom up and as far as
the eye could reach they glittered and sparkled like gigantic jewels
under the glare of the Arctic sun. When night came on and the stars came
out they shone a hundred fold brighter than in the temperate zone and
the pale blue moon illuminated the scene with a kind of a supernatural
light that seemed not to belong to earth.
But all the days and nights were by no means fine ones, for howling
gales and fierce snow storms continually sprang up and I often wondered
how a ship built and sailed by the hands of men, could weather them out.
It was a man’s work! On such occasions I stuck to my wireless room which
I found mighty comfortable and trusted to the Captain and his mates to
see the ship safely through.
As we got farther and farther north the _Aurora borealis_, or northern
lights as it is called, grew brighter and brighter every night until the
whole heavens in the region of the North Pole were scintillating with
streamers that spread out like a great fan, reaching over our heads and
far to the south. The first mate said that it was as brilliant an aurora
as he had ever seen and his explanation of it was that the spots on the
sun had been unusually large and numerous.
Not only did the sun’s activity show itself in the aurora, but it set up
a violent magnetic storm on earth and this made the compass needles
oscillate to and fro as much as 1½ degrees on each side of their normal
positions. Now magnetic storms always interfere very seriously with the
operation of both overland telegraph lines and cable systems where the
circuit is completed through the earth.
I had heard some one say, or had read somewhere, that a magnetic storm
would interfere in the same way with wireless messages and I was fearful
for some time that it would put our signals out of commission. But all
through the magnetic storm Mackey and I sent our messages without the
slightest trouble--indeed if we had not been told that a magnetic storm
was on we should never have guessed it. Evidently wireless had scored
another point over the wire systems and another pet theory was put on
the ice to cool.
We sailed up the coast keeping pretty close to it while the _Midnight
Sun_ steamed up and out from it until we were fifty or more miles apart.
Now here is where wireless came in, in catching seals. Over the
constantly broadening gap between our ships Mackey and I kept their
Captains right in touch with each other.
The Captain of his ship _wirelessed_ that there were any number of old
seals about him and this showed, the first mate told me, that there were
patches of _white coats_, as the young harp-seals are called, somewhere
in the neighborhood.
Our ship immediately headed in his direction and a night’s steaming
brought us within a few miles of the _Midnight Sun_, but we did not see
any white coats either. But after we scouted around for five or six
hours we sighted a patch of hundreds upon hundreds of little seal babies
basking on the ice floes in the sun. My Captain ordered me to signal the
good news of our find to the Captain of the _Midnight Sun_; he in turn
steamed at once for our ship and when she came up the killing began.
These seals are called _harp-seals_ because they have brownish yellow
bodies and on the back of each one is a big black mark like a harp. The
old harp-seals start from way up north of Melville Sound in the early
part of the winter and by March they are off the Labrador coast. There
tens of thousands of them herd together on the drifting ice when the
little _white-coats_, as the baby seals are called because their fur is
so white, are born and, curiously enough, nearly all of them are born on
the same day.
It was a great sight to see these fat roly-poly baby seals lying on
their backs on the drifting ice and using their flippers to fan
themselves with to keep cool.
A few days later the ships were so close to each other that Mackey and I
visited back and forth across the ice while the crews were busy taking
the seals. When we headed for St. Johns we had on board our ship more
than twenty-five thousand sealskins, which was as big a load as we could
carry, while the _Midnight Sun_ had nearly fifty thousand and together
we broke all previous records.
This being the case these hardened Arctic Captains were as tickled as a
couple of sea-urchins and both agreed that wireless was the greatest
sealing scheme introduced since steamers took the place of schooners.
Before we bore up for St. Johns there were great doings on board both
ships. Rockets were fired in lieu of regular fireworks and Mackey,
having the most powerful set, sent a message to old _Boreas_ and old
_Arcticus_ who are pioneers in the refrigerating business, and if the
_North Pole_ has an aerial suspended from it and the latter has a
receiver attached to it, I doubt not but that they listened-in to the
first wireless signals ever sent within the polar circle; if so, they
heard some mighty fine things said about themselves and the glorious,
though, withal frigid, country they rule over.
I wouldn’t have missed that experience for a million dollars--what’s
that?--well, not for a hundred dollars in real money anyway.