THE port of Pröven is securely sheltered by its monster hills.
But they can not be said to smile a welcome upon the navigator. A
smiling country, like a smiling face, needs some provision of fleshly
integuments; and no earthly covering masks the grinning rocks of
Pröven. They look as if the process of crumbling, and wrinkling,
and splitting, and splintering had been at work on them since the
first Arctic frost succeeded the last metamorphic fire; and even now
great ledges are wedged off from the hillsides by the ice, and roll
clattering down the slopes into the very midst of the settlement.
Summer comes slowly upon Pröven. When we arrived, the slopes of the
hills were heavily patched with snow, and the surface, where it showed
itself, was frozen dry. The water-line was toothed with fangs of broken
ice, which scraped against the beach as the tides rose and fell; and
an iceberg somehow or other had found its way into the little port. It
was a harmless lump, too deep sunk to float into dangerous nearness;
and its spire rose pleasantly, like a village church.
"_July_ 3. I am writing in the 'Hosky' House of Cristiansen.
Cristiansen is the Danish governor of Pröven, and this house of
Cristiansen is _the House_ of Pröven. Its owner is a simple and shrewd
old Dane, hale and vigorous, thirty-one of whose sixty-four winters
have been spent within the Arctic circle, north of 70° N. Lord in his
lonely region--his four sons and five subordinates, oilmen, the only
white faces about him, except when he visits Uppernavik--the good old
man has the satisfaction of knowing no superior. His habits are three
fourths Esquimaux, one-eighth Danish, and the remainder Prövenish,
or peculiarly his own. His wife is a half-breed, and his family, in
language and aspect, completely Esquimaux.
"When the long, dark winter comes, he exchanges books with his friend
the priest of Uppernavik. 'The Dantz Penning Magazin,' and 'The
History of the Unitas Fratrum,' take the place of certain well-thumbed,
ancient, sentimental novels; and sometimes the priest comes in person
to tenant the 'spare room,' which makes it very pleasant, 'for we talk
Danish.'
"Except this spare room, which elsewhere would be called the loft
of the house, its only apartment is the one in which I am. And here
eat, and drink, and cook, and sleep, and live, not only Cristiansen
and all his descendants, but his wife's mother, and her children,
grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who are growing up about her.
It is fifteen feet broad by sixteen long, with just height enough for
a grenadier, without his cap, to stand erect, and not touch the beams.
The frame of the house is of Norway pine coated with tar, with its
interspaces caulked with moss and small window-panes inserted in a deep
casing of wood.
"The most striking decorative feature is a ledge or shelf of pine
plank, of varying width, which runs round three of its sides. Its
capacity is wonderful. It is the sofa and bed, on which the entire
united family find room to loll and sleep; and upon it now are
huddled, besides a navy doctor and his writing board, one ink bottle,
sundry articles of food and refreshment, one sleeping child, one lot of
babies not in the least asleep, one canary-bird cage with its exotic
and most sorrowful little prisoner, and an infinite variety of other
articles too tedious to mention, comprising seal-skins, boots, bottles,
jumpers, glasses, crockery both of kitchen and nursery, coffee-pots,
dog-skin socks, canvas pillows, an eider-down comforter, and a sick
bitch with a youthful family of whining puppies.
"Una, the second daughter, has been sick and under treatment; and she
is now hard at work with her sisters, Anna, Sara, and Cristina, on a
tribute of gratitude to her doctor. They have been busy all the morning
whipping and stitching the seal-skins with reindeer tendon thread.
My present is to be a complete suit of ladies' apparel, made of the
richest seal-skin, according to the standard mode of Pröven, which may
always be presumed to be the 'latest winter fashion.' It is a really
elegant dress. To some the unmentionables might savor of mascularity;
but having seen something of a more polite society, my feminine
associations are not restricted to petticoats. Extremes meet in the
Esquimaux of Greenland and Amazons of Paris.
"The large family is a happy one: so small a home could not tolerate a
quarrelsome mess. The sons, the men Cristiansens, brave and stalwart
fellows, practiced in the kayack, and the sledge, and the whale-net,
adroit with the harpoon and expert with the rifle, are constant at the
chase, and bring home their spoil, with the honest pride becoming good
providers of their household. And the women, in their nursing, cooking,
tailoring, and housekeeping, are, I suppose, faithful enough. But what
favorable impression that the mind gets through other channels can
contend against the information of the nose! Organ of the aristocracy,
critic and _magister morum_ of all civilization, censor that heeds
neither argument nor remonstrance--the nose, alas! it bids me record,
that to all their possible godliness cleanliness is not superadded.
"During the short summer of daylight--it is one of the many apparent
vestiges, among this people, of ancient nomadic habits--the whole
family gather joyously in the summer's lodge, a tent of seal or
reindeer skin, pitched out of doors. Then the room has its annual
ventilation, and its cooking and chamber furniture are less liable
to be confounded. For the winter the arrangement is this: on three
sides of the room, close by the ledge I have spoken of, stand as many
large pans of porous steatite or serpentine, elevated on slight wooden
tripods. These, filled with seal-blubber, and garnished with moss
round the edge to serve as a wick, unite the functions of chandelier
and stove. They who quarrel with an ill-trimmed lamp at home should be
disciplined by one of them. Each boils its half-gallon kettle of coffee
in twenty minutes, and smokes--like a small chimney on fire; and the
three burn together. There is no flue, or fire-place, or opening of
escape.
"On the remaining side of the room stand a valued table and three
chairs; and with these, like a buhl cabinet or fancy étagère,
conspicuous in its modest corner, a tub. It is the steeping-tub for
curing skins. Its contents require active fermentation to fit them for
their office; and, to judge from the odor, the process had been going
on successfully."
We warped out to sea again on the afternoon of the third, with our
friend the cooper for pilot; the entire settlement turning out upon the
rocks to wish us good-by, and remaining there till they looked in the
distance like a herd of seal. But we found no opening in the pack, and
came back again to Pröven on the fourth, not sorry, as the weather was
thickening, to pass our festival inside the little port.
Our celebration was of the primitive order. We saluted the town with
one of the largest balanced stones, which we rolled down from the cliff
above; and made an egg-nogg of eider eggs; and the men had a Hosky
ball; and, in a word, we all did our best to make the day differ from
other days--which attempt failed. Still, God ever bless the fourth!
The sixth was Sunday, and we attended church in the morning at the
schoolmaster's. The service consisted of a long-winded hymn, and
a longer winded sermon, in the Esquimaux--surely the longest of
long-winded languages. The congregation were some two dozen men and
women, not counting our party.
We put to sea in the afternoon. The weather was soft and warm on shore;
but outside it was perfectly delightful: no wind--the streams of ice
beyond enforcing a most perfect calm upon the water; the thermometer in
the sunshine frequently as high as 76°, and never sinking below 30° in
the shade. I basked on deck all night, sleeping in the sun.
And such a night! I saw the moon at midnight, while the sun was
slanting along the tinted horizon, and duplicated by reflection from
the water below it: the dark bergs to seaward had outlines of silver;
and two wild cataracts on the shore-side were falling from ice-backed
cliffs twelve hundred feet into the sea.
_July_ 7. I was awakened from my dreamy sleep to receive the visits of
a couple of boats that were working slowly to us through the floes.
An English face--two English faces--twelve English faces: what a happy
sight! We had had no one but ourselves to speak our own tongue to for
three hundred days, and were as glad to listen to it as if we had
been serving out the time in the penitentiary of silence at Auburn or
Sing-Sing. Their broad North Briton was music. It was not the offensive
dialect of the provincial Englishman, with the affectation of speaking
his language correctly; but a strong and manly home-brew of the best
language in the world for words of sincere and hearty good-will. They
had to turn up their noses at our seal's-liver breakfast; but, when
they heard of our winter trials, they stuffed down the seal without
tasting it. I felt sorry after they were off, that I had not taken
their names down every one.
The whaling vessels to which they returned were in the freer water
outside the shore stream, the _Jane O'Boness_, Captain John Walker; and
the _Pacific_, Captain Patterson. These gentlemen boarded us as soon as
we got through the ice to them. They thought our escape miraculous;
and it was some time before they found words to congratulate us.
"Augh!" and "Wonderful!" with a peculiar interchange of looks, was all
they said.
These burned children dread the fire; and their conversation opened our
eyes to dangers we had gone through half unconsciously. Few masters in
the whaling trade but have at some time suffered wreck. Two seasons
ago, this veteran Patterson saw his ship thrust bodily through another,
and then the transfixed and transfixing vessels were both eaten up
together by the greedy floes. He stepped from the last remnant of his
buried sail on to the hummocks: "And that's a' that e'e ha' seen o'
her!"
They left us newspapers, potatoes, turnips, eggs, and fresh beef enough
to eat out every taint of scurvy! They took letters from us for home,
and cheered ship when we parted. I must not soon forget the Pacific and
_Jane O'Boness_.
(_Editor's note._) The next day they made Uppernavik. July and a good
part of August were spent in a vain endeavor to return to Lancaster
Sound and complete their explorations in Wellington Channel; but the
ships were so beset with floes and icebergs that this project had to
be abandoned. On August 21st the expedition headed homeward, and it
arrived in New York on September 30, 1851.
THE END
* * * * *
OUTING ADVENTURE LIBRARY
_Edited by Horace Kephart_
¶ Here are brought together for the first time the great stories of
adventure of all ages and countries. These are the personal records
of the men who climbed the mountains and penetrated the jungles; who
explored the seas and crossed the deserts; who knew the chances and
took them, and lived to write their own tales of hardship and endurance
and achievement. The series will consist of an indeterminate number of
volumes--for the stories are myriad. The whole will be edited by Horace
Kephart. Each volume answers the test of these two questions: Is it
true? Is it interesting?
¶ The entire series is uniform in style and binding. Among the titles
now ready or in preparation are those described on the fol lowing pages.
PRICE $1.00 EACH, NET. POSTAGE 10 CENTS EXTRA
THE NUMBERS MAKE ORDERING CONVENIENT
1. IN THE OLD WEST, by George Frederick Ruxton. The men who blazed the
trail across the Rockies to the Pacific were the independent trappers
and hunters in the days before the Mexican war. They left no records
of their adventures and most of them linger now only as shadowy names.
But a young Englishman lived among them for a time, saw life from
their point of view, trapped with them and fought with them against
the Indians. That was George Frederick Ruxton. His story is our only
complete picture of the Old West in the days of the real Pioneers, of
Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Bill Williams, the Sublettes, and all the rest
of that glorious company of the forgotten who opened the West.
2. CASTAWAYS AND CRUSOES. Since the beginnings of navigation men have
faced the dangers of shipwreck and starvation. Scattered through the
annals of the sea are the stories of those to whom disaster came and
the personal records of the way they met it. Some of them are given in
this volume, narratives of men who lived by their hands among savages
and on forlorn coasts, or drifted helpless in open boats. They range
from the South Seas to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, from the iron coast of
Patagonia to the shores of Cuba, They are echoes from the days when the
best that could be hoped by the man who went to sea was hardship and
man's-sized work.
3. CAPTIVES AMONG THE INDIANS. First of all is the story of Captain
James Smith, who was captured by the Delawares at the time of
Braddock's defeat, was adopted into the tribe, and for four years lived
as an Indian, hunting with them, studying their habits, and learning
their point of view. Then there is the story of Father Bressani who
felt the tortures of the Iroquois, of Mary Rowlandson who was among the
human spoils of King Philip's war, and of Mercy Harbison who suffered
in the red flood that followed St. Clair's defeat. All are personal
records made by the actors themselves in those days when the Indian was
constantly at our forefathers's doors.
4. FIRST THROUGH THE GRAND CANYON, by Major John Wesley Powell. Major
Powell was an officer in the Union Army who lost an arm at Shiloh. In
spite of this four years after the war he organized an expedition which
explored the Grand Canyon of the Colorado in boats--the first to make
this journey. His story has been lost for years in the oblivion of a
scientific report. It is here rescued and presented as a record of one
of the great personal exploring feats, fitted to rank with the exploits
of Pike, Lewis and Clark, and Mackenzie.
5. ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE-PACK, By Elisha Kent Kane, M. D. Out of
the many expeditions that went north in search of Sir John Franklin
over fifty years ago, it fell to the lot of one, financed by a New York
merchant, to spend an Arctic winter drifting aimlessly in the grip of
the Polar ice in Lancaster Sound. The surgeon of the expedition kept a
careful diary and out of that record told the first complete story of a
Far Northern winter. That story is here presented, shorn of the purely
scientific data and stripped to the personal exploits and adventures of
the author and the other members of the crew.
* * * * *
Transcriber's Note
Standardization of hyphenated words was employed. Illustrations were moved
to rejoin paragraphs split by them. Although the original printed version
used un-italicized drop caps for month names beginning the chapter text,
the whole month's name was converted to italics here.
End of Project Gutenberg's Adrift in the Arctic Ice Pack, by Elisha Kent Kane