“WAY ENOUGH,” SAID JOE. “STERN ALL!” ([see p. 105])

THE
YOUNG ICE WHALERS

BY WINTHROP PACKARD

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT 1903 BY WINTHROP PACKARD
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published September, 1903

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE YOUNG ICE WHALERS

CHAPTER I
A CHANGE IN LIFE’S PLANS

“I will do what I can to help make matters easy, father.”

The speaker was a handsome, well-built boy of seventeen, with a frank, winsome face that ordinarily showed neither strength nor weakness of character,—the face of a boy out of whom circumstances make much that is good, or sometimes much that is ill, according to what experiences life brings him. There are boys who will grow up strong and able men, anyway. They seem to have it in them from the start. There are others who have an inborn tendency to evil and dissipation, which no amount of training and opportunity for better things can eradicate. Harry Desmond was of neither of these types; his character was rather that which responds easily to outside influences, whose weaknesses may easily grow upon it, or whose strong points may be developed and brought out by use.

“Thank you, my son,” said the other simply, extending his hand; “I was very sure you would. The business will of course go on, and may be built up again with care and strict economy; but the outside investments, whose returns have made us well-to-do, and from which the money for your education was coming, are totally swept away. I’m afraid we shall have to withdraw you from the preparatory school. It is an expensive place, and just at present I do not feel able to supply you with the money necessary to keep up your standing among the boys there. In another year I had hoped to see you in the freshman class at Harvard, and that may yet be managed. There are always scholarships to be had.”

“Father,” said Harry impulsively, “I don’t think I care for college. I’d rather help you. To tell the truth, I have not stood very well at school; I mean my marks have not been high. I have managed to pass always, but it has been a close shave sometimes. I’ve liked it immensely because I have had such jolly times with the other fellows. I have thought of college much in the same way. So long as we had plenty of money, it was just as well to go. A college man who has spending-money has no end of a good time, and I don’t doubt I could pass in the studies as well as a good many of the fellows. But now it’s different. You’ve always stood by me like a brick. Now I want to help you.”

A look of pride and delight beamed in the careworn face of the elder Desmond, and the stoop came out of his shoulders a little as if a weight had been lifted from them. He had expected the boy would meet the news bravely and carry himself well. He knew his own blood. The Desmonds had never yet been the men to cry baby when unpleasant things had to be faced, and yet—he knew now how it had weighed upon him—he had feared in his heart for the effect of the news on his only son. He knew of the low marks at the preparatory school, and how careless and pleasure loving the boy had seemed. There had been one or two escapades, also, things which showed carelessness and high spirits rather than viciousness, and they had worried him a good deal.

“I think we shall be able to keep the house, here,” said the father, “though we shall have to live rather simply. The horses must go and most of the servants, but when that is done and things straightened out a bit, we shall owe no man a penny. The hardest rub is coming in the business. There we must reorganize and retrench, and the office force is badly cut down.”

Harry hesitated, though it was only for a moment, and swallowed a lump in his throat. He had a pretty good idea of the drudgery of the office. The younger clerks came in at eight or before, and never got away until six. That was for every week in the year, except a brief vacation of ten days or so. He thought of his Saturdays and holidays, of the long vacation in the heat of summer; and then he saw the careworn look in his father’s face, and he held up his head and spoke swiftly.

“I’d be glad to help you in the office if I can, sir,” he said; “I’m pretty handy at figures and have a good idea of book-keeping. I’d like to do it, if you’ll only let me. A year or two of it would be good for me. Then, if things go better, it will not be too late to go to college after all. Perhaps I shall feel more like it then.” He smiled somewhat grimly, mentally noting how swiftly ideas and ideals change. College, which had seemed inevitable only a few short hours before, had not appealed to him except as a pleasant place to spend time and enjoy himself. Now he suddenly seemed to see how useful it might be to him in the future, yet that he would probably not be able to go there.

“It is a good deal of a sacrifice, my boy,” said his father, “but you really could help me there a great deal. I need some one with the force whom I can be sure of as loyal to my interests. Think it over for a day, and if you are still willing you can begin right away. It is almost worth while to be ruined financially to find one’s son so plucky about it and so loyal to the house. I shall have to let you go now; I am to have a business conference here in a few minutes, and I see the others coming down-street now. Be as cheerful as you can about this with your mother. I think it is hardest on her; but if we can all be patient for a few years, I think I can pull through and get matters in good shape again. Good-by.”

Harry left the library, put his hat on, and stepped out of doors. It was one of those days in late April that make one glad he is alive, and in New England. The grass was already green upon the lawn, the buds were swelling in the shrubbery, and a bluebird caroled as he fluttered from the bare limbs of a maple and inspected the bird-box where he planned to build his nest in spite of the scolding of the English sparrows that flocked about and threatened to mob him, but did not quite dare. Harry turned down the gravel path toward the boat-house. Beyond, the waters of the bay sparkled and ruffled in the wind, and his knockabout, new only last year, swung and curtsied at the mooring as if in recognition of her master. The lump came in Harry’s throat again. If he worked in the office, he would have little time in the long bright summer just ahead of him to sail the blue waters of the bay. Besides, perhaps he ought not to keep the knockabout. The boat was worth money, and should be given up just as much as the horses. Well, he had the boat now, and the afternoon; he would have a sail while yet he might. It would give him a chance to think over things, too, as his father had suggested, though he knew his mind was made up already. He found the skiff at the landing, rowed to the boat, hoisted mainsail and jib, then, as an afterthought, instead of towing the skiff astern he made it fast to the mooring and sailed away without it. It was one of those little decisions which mean nothing at the time, but which, such are the mysterious ways of Fate, often change the whole current of life.

Pointing well up into the wind, the graceful boat slipped rapidly through the water. She was breasting the incoming tide, Harry knew, for he could feel that peculiar quiver of the rudder that thrills through the tiller into the arm when a finely balanced boat heads the tide and beats to windward at the same time. Harry looked backward at the Quincy Point Village as it slowly drew away from him. He saw the fine old houses,—his own the finest of them all,—and was devoutly glad that the business reverses were not so great that they would have to leave that. On the rear veranda of one of them he saw the gleam of a white dress, and a young girl waved her hand at him. It was Maisie Adams, he knew, and he regretted that he had not seen her sooner. Maisie was a jolly good sailor, and he would have liked her for company. It was the time of the spring vacations, and Maisie was home from boarding-school. She would no doubt have enjoyed this first sail of the season. He almost decided to put back and ask her to go out, then he happened to think he was no longer the prospective Harvard freshman with plenty of money to spend, but the prospective clerk in an office, and not likely to have even the boat he was sailing, after a few days. He ought to have had sense enough to know that this would make no difference with Maisie, but he was only a boy after all, and could not be expected to know much about the way a really nice girl like Maisie would look at things of this sort. So he pulled his hat down over his eyes a little—to keep out the sun, of course—and sent the knockabout bowling along down the Fore River, by Germantown, by Rock Island Head, and out into the wider bay toward Hull, where he got the full sweep of the bustling spring breeze.

Meanwhile Maisie pouted on the piazza. She had recognized Harry, and she, too, wished he had seen her sooner. The day was warm, almost like summer, and she would have liked a sail down the bay. However, she got some fancy work and sat down in a big piazza chair in the sun, with a wrap about her shoulders, determined to watch the boat if she could not sail in it. After a little while her mother came out.

“Aren’t you catching cold out here, Maisie?” she asked.

“I think not, mamma,” replied Maisie. “It’s just as warm as a summer day, and I thought it would be nice to sit here in the sun and embroider—and watch the boats. Sit down with me, won’t you, and talk to me?”

“I knew you wouldn’t be home long before you were on the lookout for a sail,” said Mrs. Adams rather roguishly. She knew that Harry Desmond’s knockabout was the finest small boat on the river, and that he and Maisie were great friends. “There aren’t many of the boats in commission yet. I thought I saw the Princess”—that was Harry’s boat—“at the mooring yesterday, but I see that I was mistaken.”

Mrs. Adams smiled quietly to herself as she saw the faint color creep up into Maisie’s cheek and hide itself under the dark ringlets of her hair. Then the girl looked up with charming frankness and said, “The Princess was there a few moments ago, but Harry has just gone out in her. See, he is almost down to Sheep Island now. He would have taken me, I think, if he had known I was at home.”

Maisie looked straight into her mother’s eyes, and that was one of Maisie’s chief charms. She had a way of looking at you clearly and honestly, and you knew that you were looking down through pretty gray eyes into a heart that was as open and frank as it was sunny.

“I should have been perfectly willing to have you go,” said her mother. “Harry is a very gentlemanly boy, and a good sailor. I think I can trust you with him.”

“I think you can trust me with any of the boys I am willing to go sailing with, can you not, mamma?” said Maisie, and knowing it to be true, Mrs. Adams gave her daughter a little squeeze of affection and changed the subject.

They sat and talked for a long time in the bright afternoon sun, while Maisie embroidered industriously, now and then glancing at the sail of the Princess, which had diminished to a little white speck over toward the mouth of the harbor, then grown again as her skipper headed toward home. By and by Mrs. Adams went into the house, and Maisie laid down her embroidery and strolled across the lawn and down the path toward the Adams’s boat-house.

There she found none of the boats put into the water for the season except the smallest, a light little thing with one pair of oars. Maisie was a good oarsman, and she often rowed one or another of the boats up the placid reaches of the Fore River, above the bridge; so there was nothing uncommon in what she now did. Finding it ready for use, she got into the little skiff, cast off the painter, and was soon skimming with easy strokes under the bridge and away up-river. The bridge and the heights of land on either side of it soon hid the bay and the sail of the Princess from her sight, if not from her thoughts. There were plenty of interesting things to see up-river, and who shall say that she did not turn her whole attention to these? At any rate, she alternately rowed and floated for some time, and thoroughly enjoyed the vigorous exercise and the outing in the bright spring sunshine. By and by the ebbing tide carried her back toward the bridge, and she turned the bow of her skiff homeward just as the Princess, with the west wind in her sails, came nodding and curtsying up toward her mooring.

Harry had thought it all out, and was at peace with himself. He would take the clerkship in the office and work patiently and bravely. Perhaps he would like business better than he thought, or if he did not, he could work faithfully and hope for an improvement in the family fortunes that would enable him to enter college after a few years. He had heard it said that a year or two of experience in business was a good thing for a boy who was to enter college, just as a college education was a sure help in business, if that were to be taken up after graduation. At any rate, he would be doing the thing that his father wanted him to do, and that was bound to be best. So, with the buoyancy of boyhood asserting itself, his brow was clear, the trouble was already behind him, and he whistled a merry tune as he tacked to make his mooring.

Then he noted a skiff coming through the draw of the bridge with the tide, and gave a cheerful shout of greeting as he recognized Maisie in it. Suddenly something happened, and just how it did happen neither of them could clearly tell. The skiff was passing the piling at one side of the draw, and perhaps an oar caught between two piles, perhaps Maisie turned too suddenly at the call of greeting, or the sweep of the tide did it, or all three. Whatever it was, the skiff overturned, and before Harry could realize what had happened, Maisie’s dark head floated for a moment beside the upset skiff, then sank beneath the water while the skiff floated away. He swung the tiller of the Princess swiftly so as to throw the boat back on the other tack and head for the spot, which was not far away; but quick as the knockabout was in stays, the two tacks, one immediate upon the other, had lost her headway, and she got a fill of wind too late to fairly make the spot where Maisie had gone down. As the girl’s head again came above water, the boat was a dozen feet to leeward and would be no nearer. There was but one thing to do, if she were to be rescued, and Harry did it. Letting go of tiller and sheet, he sprang quickly overboard and plunged with vigorous strokes in her direction, shouting a word of encouragement which she did not seem to heed, but which was answered by a wild warwhoop from the shore.

There the ancient ferryman, who takes people across from Germantown to the Point for a nickel, had suddenly waked up to the catastrophe and nearly swallowed his pipe, which he had been smoking placidly when it happened. He saw the need of immediate help, and sprang into the stern of his skiff and snatched an oar from the thwarts, swinging it hastily into the scull hole, very nearly upsetting himself in his excitement. Then he vigorously plied the oar and sent the clumsy boat through the water toward the scene of the accident.

Maisie was behaving herself well. Used to the water, but so weighted and snarled in her skirts that she was unable to swim, she nevertheless did not hamper Harry by needlessly clinging to him, but simply grasped his shoulders and clung tenaciously, though speechless and half drowned already. Yet Harry was having a hard time of it. He was a good swimmer, but the ice-cold water seemed to grip his chest and stop his breathing. He held Maisie up and looked for the Princess, but the boat, with its sheet caught, had swung off the wind and was rapidly sailing away. He could not reach the shore, and he knew it. He could hold Maisie up for a while, if he spared his strength as much as possible. There was a chance that help might come, though he could not tell from where. His head whirled, but he swam mechanically. Once they went under, and then as they came up something struck his shoulder and he grasped it and held on.

The swift tide had floated them out toward the mooring, and set them alongside the skiff that he had inadvertently left there some hours before. Thus kindly Fate helps us oftentimes in little things. It was only an impulse that had made him leave the skiff at the mooring, and now it was to be his salvation and Maisie’s as well.

There he clung, to be sure, but he was unable to lift the girl into the skiff. His head whirled with excitement and fatigue, but he would not let go. The iron grip of the icy water on his chest seemed to crush the strength out of him, and he scarcely knew when the ferryman, his clumsy craft quivering with new-found speed, swung alongside and lifted first Maisie and then him into the boat. Then with a strong sweep of his oar the old man swung the boat’s head toward the shore, and fell to sculling desperately without the utterance of a word.

Harry was still dazed and breathless, and Maisie was the first to recover speech. “I’m sorry I made so much trouble,” she said faintly to Griggs, “but we were nearly drowned, and would have been quite if you had not come just as you did. We thank you very much.”

Then she turned to Harry, who could still only smile faintly and shiver. “I have to thank you, too, for my life. I should have gone down before any one else could get to me if you had not been so quick and brave.” She held out her hand to him and he clasped it for a moment, while his teeth managed to chatter that it was all right.

The ferryman turned his head over his shoulder and grinned cheerfully and reassuringly across his pipe, which was still gripped in his teeth, but he said no word, only went on sculling. Then the boat reached the landing and he helped Maisie out and gave a hand to Harry. The boy rose with difficulty, he was so chilled.

“Thank you, Griggs,” he said as he stepped on the wharf. “You came just in the nick of time, and I’ll see that you have more than thanks for your trouble and coolness.”

“Don’t you say a word, Mr. Harry,” said the ferryman. “You and I’ve been shipmates a good many times, and your folks have been more than kind to me. I’ll get the Princess back to her mooring for you. I’m mighty glad I was on hand, and you’ll do me a favor if you won’t say anything more about it.”

Harry was feeling better, but his teeth chattered still as he stumbled along with Maisie to her own door. At home he told his mother quietly that he had had a ducking, saying nothing about the rescue, and went to bed, while she dosed him with hot drinks. He did not seem to recover as he should, and his mother sent for the family physician. He laughed at the escapade, and gave Harry medicines that brought him round all right in due time, though not feeling very active. But the next day the doctor took care to call on Mr. Desmond privately.

“The boy is all right,” he said; “and the ducking isn’t going to hurt him any, but I want to warn you that though he is constitutionally sound, he seems lacking a bit in vitality. He is not very resilient; that is to say, things that some boys would throw off as a duck does water are likely to hurt him. Indoor life is bad for him. He’s the sort of chap that should be out in the open as much as possible for a few years. Don’t let him study too hard. Keep him sailing his boat and playing outdoor games while his constitution hardens.”

A day or two afterward Harry came into the library and found his father with an open letter in his hand.

“I’m ready to report for business, father,” said the boy, smiling. “How soon do you want me to begin at the office?”

“Are you really anxious to begin?” asked his father.

“Why, yes, father,” said Harry. “I know it will be a good deal of a grind, but it will be good for me, and I feel that I am big enough now to help when you need me.”

“Did Maisie stand her ducking all right?” asked his father with a smile, suddenly changing the subject.

“Why—yes, sir,” faltered Harry. “How did you know about it? I wasn’t going to tell anything about that part of it.”

“Oh, I saw Mr. Adams yesterday and he was quite full of the story. He spoke very nicely about your share in it, and I am quite proud of you.”

“Oh, sir,” said Harry, turning very red with pleasure at his father’s praise; “it wasn’t anything much, and anyway it was Mr. Griggs who pulled us both out. We would not have got out at all if it hadn’t been for him.”

“Well,” said his father, “it was a very fortunate escape, and I’m glad it came out as it did. But I have two things that I wish to talk to you about, and it may be that we shall not need you in the office at all, but can use you to better advantage in another way. First, I want you to read this letter from Captain Nickerson, my old friend from Nantucket.”

He handed Harry a letter written in a cramped but bold handwriting. It was as follows:—

Whaling Bark Bowhead, Honolulu, January 15, 189-.

Dear Friend Desmond,—It is a year since I wrote you last, and longer than that since I have heard from you, but shall hope to hear from you when we arrive at Frisco, which will be in April unless something comes up to prevent. We have had rather an uneventful cruise so far, and have taken but few whales in the South Seas. We shall land about 1100 barrels of oil, however, as the result of the cruise up to date. We are refitting here as the result of a hurricane which we took about a month ago, in which we lost the fore-topmast and some gear with it. No one was hurt except two Kanakas, one of whom went overboard when the gale first struck us, and the other got a broken arm by a fall from the foreyard during the gale. How he escaped going overboard is a mystery, but it is pretty hard to lose a Kanaka. I watched out for the other one most of the way into Honolulu. Expected nothing but he might swim alongside and board us, but he didn’t come. Picked up a couple of white men off the beach here to take their places. Think they may prove good men. They have been on the beach long enough to know what it is to have a good ship under them and regular fare, though not so good as you people at home get, doubtless.

The old ship is in fine trim again, taut and nobby as a race horse over on the Brockton track. Guess I shall not be home in time to take in the county fair this year, though I would like to. We shall fit out again either at Frisco or Seattle, and will probably touch at Seattle anyway on our way north. I am going to cruise through Bering Sea and into the Arctic this summer for bowheads. Oil is cheap now, but bone is higher than ever, and a good shipload of bone and ivory, such as we can probably get if we go north, will be worth while. And this brings me to one object in writing this letter. My boy Joe is with us this cruise, and as fine a young sailor as ever you saw. I wish, however, he had a lad of good family of his own age for company. I do not like to have him have the crew alone for friends. Some of them are good fellows, too, but many of them are, as you no doubt guess, a rough lot. Your son Harry must be about his age now,—eighteen. Why do not you let him come on and meet us at Seattle, and go north for the summer? He would enjoy the cruise thoroughly, and no doubt learn much that is useful to a young lad just growing up. We shall be back by November at the latest, and it would be nothing much but a summer vacation for him. If you think he would like to go, why not send him on? We’ll make a man of him, and a sailor man at that. I spoke to Joe about it, and he is wild with delight at the idea. He remembers the visit that you all made to us at Nantucket some years ago, in which he and Harry came to be great friends. It would be good for his health, too. There is no place like the Arctic in summer for putting health and strength into a man. Besides, I could give him a paying berth as supercargo. There is not much to do in this except a little book-keeping, and that is just what a boy who has been to school as much as Harry has would do easily and well. He would have to keep track of the ship’s stores, keep account of expenditures, and such things as that. The pay is not large, but it would give him some pocket-money when he got back, and he would not feel that he was dependent, or a guest even.

Write to me at Frisco about the middle of April, and we will plan to have him meet us there or at Seattle before we start out, which will be some time early in May.

With many pleasant memories of old school-days together when Nantucket was really a whaling town, and the schoolmasters did a good deal of whaling,—Lord! what pranks we used to play, we two!—and my regards to Mrs. Desmond, and many to yourself, I am,

Yours very truly,

William Nickerson.

Mr. Desmond watched Harry narrowly as he read this letter. He saw his eyes light up at the prospect, and noted his suppressed excitement. Then the boy handed it back, and steadied himself.

“But you need me in the office, don’t you, father?” was all he said.

“Would you like to go?” asked his father.

“Why, yes, very much, sir,” answered Harry frankly; “but not enough to go when you need me for other work here at home. If things were as they were a year ago I should tease to be allowed to go, but now I would rather stay at home.”

Mr. Desmond looked pleased. “Now,” he said, “this is the other matter I wished to speak about. My business conference the other morning was with Mr. Adams and some other wealthy men who are planning to make large investments in the whaling and trading vessels which go north into Bering Sea and the Arctic each year after whalebone and ivory. There is a good demand for whalebone commercially, and there are some industries which cannot well get along without it. At the same time the supply is limited, and the market would easily pay a much higher price for it. I am partly interested in this as a small share-owner in the Bowhead. It was hardly reckoned as an asset in the business difficulty, as the whaling has not paid well of late years, and dividends are few and far between. So I still retain the stock. The plan of these gentlemen is to concentrate all these vessels under one management, obtain control of the world’s available supply of whalebone each year, and, by careful business methods and proper handling of the market, make a good paying business of what is now conducted often at a loss. The scheme is already under way, but the arrangements will not be completed until next fall. Meanwhile we are anxious to get a report of the conditions in that country, and the circumstances under which the business of Arctic whaling and trading is carried on. If you take this trip with Captain Nickerson, you will have a chance to see much of these conditions, and be able to make such a report. It is true that you are young and inexperienced in such matters, but your work may be all the better for that. You will have no prejudices or already formed opinions to bias you, and what you lack in experience in that region may be made up by conversation with those who have made previous cruises there. At any rate, Mr. Adams seemed to think it was worth our while to give you such a commission, if you went out there. He seems much interested in you since the upset, and if you go, you will go on a modest salary in his employ, he being the head of the enterprise. That will perhaps be better for us both than work in the office would be. Now what do you say? Will you go?”

Harry looked hard at his father, saw that he, as usual, meant what he said, and was really desirous of having him go, and then his delight and enthusiasm bubbled right over. He danced about his father, wrung his hand, and in general acted more like a crazy boy than the sedate and repressed youth who had been so willing to go into the office. As he rushed off to tell his mother, and plan his arrangements for the trip, Mr. Desmond smiled cheerily.

“Humph!” he said to himself, “I suppose the doctor was right, but there certainly doesn’t seem to be much lack of vitality there.”

That afternoon he sent and received the following telegrams:—

To Nickerson, Whaling Bark Bowhead, San Francisco, Cal.

Have decided to let Harry go north with you. Where shall he meet you, and when?

H. N. Desmond.

To H. N. Desmond, Franklin St., Boston, Mass.

Will be in Seattle May tenth to fifteenth. Have Harry meet me there. Great news.

Nickerson.

Mr. Desmond wrote also, and five days later received a letter from Captain Nickerson, which he had evidently written as soon as the telegrams were exchanged, giving further instructions. Arrangements were hurriedly but carefully made, and one day early in May Harry bade good-by to father, mother, and many friends at the station in Boston, and was off. Maisie was there too, with a smile on her face but a tear in her eye as she bade him good-by with a friendly handshake.

“Good-by, Harry,” she said. “I hope you won’t go plunging overboard after careless young ladies, up there among the Eskimos. It would be just like you, though. Be a good boy, and bring me a polar bear or something when you come back.”

“Good-by, Maisie,” replied Harry. “I’ll bring you the finest aurora borealis there is in all the Arctic.”

Some one shouted “All aboard,” the train rumbled from the station, gathering headway rapidly, and Harry Desmond was fairly launched upon a new life, which was to be so strange and so different from the old that he was often to be like the old lady in the nursery tale, who exclaimed periodically, “Lauk-a-mercy on us! This can’t be I.”

CHAPTER II
BOUND FOR THE ARCTIC

The city of Seattle grows to-day by leaps and bounds. The roar of traffic sounds unceasingly in her streets, the city limits press outward in all directions into the unoccupied territory near by, and the present prosperity and future magnitude of the place seem already assured. She sits, the queen of the Sound, at the meeting-point between the great transcontinental railroads and the great trans-Pacific steamship lines. Great steamers, the largest in the world’s carrying trade, ply unceasingly between the magnificent waters of Puget Sound and the mysterious ports of the far East, as we have learned to call it,—though from Seattle it is the far West,—and fetch and carry the products of the Orient and those of our own great country. Mighty full-riggers from the seas of half the world lift their towering masts skyward, as they swing at the city’s moorings in water that is just offshore, but so deep that the ordinary ship’s cable hardly reaches bottom, hence special cables and moorings are provided. To the westward the Olympic Mountains, clad with the finest timber in the world, lift their snowy cloud-capped summits to the sky, and glow rosy in the light of the setting sun; while, between the city and these mountains beautiful, flow land-locked waters which might hold all the navies of all the world without being crowded, and which seem destined to be the centre of the commerce of the coming century, borne over seas that are yet new to the world’s traffic.

Thus to-day! yet a decade and less ago the city was far from being as energetic. Seattle then slept in the lethargy of a “boom” that had spent itself, and was but just beginning to feel the stir of new life and a solid and real prosperity. Splendid business blocks were but half tenanted, many of the original boomers were financially ruined, yet the city kept up its courage, and had an unabating faith that position and pluck would win out. Already this faith was beginning to have its reward in works, and the faint glimmerings of future great advancement were in sight. More business began to reach the port, and the often almost deserted docks had now and then a ship. One of these on the day of which I write was the Bowhead, and certainly business bustle was not wanting on and near her. Perhaps the amount of work going on was not so very great, but the bustle more than made up for that, and Ben Stovers, the Bowhead’s boatswain, was the guide and director of this bustle, and to blame for the most of its noise.

Stovers had a voice as big as his frame, and that was six feet two in longitude, as he would have said, and it seemed almost that in latitude. Surely, like this terrestrial globe, his greatest circumference was at the equator. Captain Nickerson was wont to say that Stovers was worth his weight in ballast, and that made him the most valuable man on the ship. It was a stock joke on the part of the first mate, when the wind blew half a gale, the crew were aloft reefing topsails, and the good ship plunged to windward with her lee-rail awash, and her deck set on a perilous slant, to politely ask the mighty boatswain to step to the windward rail so that the ship might be on an even keel once more.

It was the voice of this mighty man that was Harry’s first greeting as he came down the dock toward the vessel that was to be his home for the long cruise. It rolled up the dock and reëchoed from the warehouses, and every time its foghorn tones sounded, a little thrill of energy ran through the busy crew.

“Hi there! Bear a hand with that cask,” it yelled, and two or three dusky Kanakas would jump as if stung, and the cask they had been languidly handling would roll up the gang-way as if it concealed a motor.

“Come on now, Johnson, and you, Phipps; this is no South Sea siesta. Stir your mud-hooks and flip that bread aboard. Wow, whoop! you’re not on the beach now, you beach-combers; you’ve got wages coming to you. Step lively there!” Result, great rise and fall in breadstuffs, and boxes of hard bread going over the rail and down the hold in a way that made the Chinese cook below shout strange Oriental gibberish, in alarm lest the boxes be stove and the contents go adrift.

“Lighter ahoy!”—this to the man driving a cart down the dock; “clap on sail now and come alongside. We’ve got to get away from this dock before night or the city’ll own the vessel for dock charges.”

This sally brought a grin from the loungers, not a few, who watched the loading, dock charges being always a sore point with the vessels’ owners, and brought the pair of bronchos and the load of goods down the crazy planking at a hand-gallop.

Flour in bags, bolts of cotton cloth and many hued calico, shotguns and rifles, ammunition, what the whalers know as “trade goods” of all sorts, for traffic with the Eskimo tribes, were all being hustled aboard the vessel before the impulse of this great voice, which sounded very fierce, and certainly spurred on the motley crew to greater exertions. Yet it had a ring of good humor in it all, and the men obeyed with a grin as if they liked it.

A tall young fellow with bronzed face and black curly hair stood noting the goods that came aboard and checking them off on a block of paper. He looked up as Harry came down the dock, then gave a shout of recognition, and came down the gangplank with hand extended.

“It’s Harry Desmond, isn’t it?” he said; “awful glad you came. When did you get here? Father is up in the city doing some business. He’ll be as glad as I am that you are here. Come right aboard. I’m Joe Nickerson; of course you remember me, don’t you? You’re a good deal bigger and older, but you haven’t changed a bit. I’d know you anywhere. My! but I’m glad you are going up with us.”

He glanced somewhat dubiously at the black hand-satchel that Harry was carrying, but said nothing about it as they went up the plank. Not so the boatswain; he took one look at it and rolled heavily forward.

“Ax your pardon, young feller,” he said; “but ye’d better not take the hard-luck bag aboard, had you? Don’t you want to leave it down here on the dock? We’ll see that it’s safe till you go ashore again.”

Harry was somewhat surprised, and inclined to resent this seemingly needless interference, but Joe spoke up before he could say anything. “Mr. Stovers,” he said, “this is my friend Harry Desmond, of whom you’ve heard me speak. He’s going up with us this trip as supercargo.”

The big boatswain reached down a hand like a ham, and shook Harry’s awkwardly with it.

“Glad t’ meet you,” he said. “Didn’t mean nothing sassy about the bag, you know, but sailors are queer fellows. ’Tain’t me; I don’t believe it, but the crew think a black bag is full of gales of wind, and lets ’em out when it’s brought aboard ship. See ’em looking at it, now. ’F you could leave it ashore, and bring your dunnage on in a canvas bag, they’d feel better about it. No use getting the men grumbling down for’ard.”

“Certainly,” said Harry politely. “I’ll leave it out on the dock here, if some one will keep an eye on it for a while till I can get something else. Glad you told me. I don’t want to be a bad weather man my first cruise.”

“Thank you,” said the boatswain with equal politeness; “I guess you and I’ll get along all right.” Then he turned suddenly to the crew, who were loitering and gazing uneasily at the black bag.

“’Vast gawking there, and bend on to that dunnage. Whoop, now! Get her up here! Heave her up, boys, lively now; the gale’s gone down. That’s the new supercargo, and you don’t want to go cutting up any monkeyshines with him. He’s going to leave the hard-luck poke-sack ashore.”

“I’ve got a trunk over at the station, too,” said Harry, as they went down the companion-way aft. “Do you suppose they’ll mind if I bring that aboard?”

“Well,” said Joe, “they’re superstitious about trunks, too, although they don’t care so much about them as they do about a black bag. That’s a special hoodoo.”

“I’ll store them both ashore, then,” said Harry resolutely; “I want to start all fair with the crew. You have things pretty nice down here, don’t you?” he went on with some surprise as they entered the cabin. Here he saw a room with a well-furnished dining-table, and doors leading off, the fittings being in hard wood, and the whole having an air of refinement and home surroundings pleasant to see.

“Why, yes,” said Joe. “You see a whaling captain lives aboard his vessel the year round, and we like to have things snug. Father’s cabin is just aft of this. He keeps his charts there and instruments. The first mate has the one on the starboard, and you and I are to share this.”

Joe, as he spoke, showed Harry into a little cabin which was lighted by a port side dead-light, and which had two neat berths with clean bedding and white sheets. There was abundant locker room, and the whole looked somewhat as any boy’s room might that was occupied by a young man studious and interested in outdoor sports. A rifle and shotgun hung on the wall, and other boyish belongings were scattered about. There was a shelf or two of books, and it reminded Harry in a certain way of his own room at home. Joe noted his approval with pleasure, and seeing him glance at the books said:—

“Father’s got quite a library in his room that you are welcome to use. We’ll study navigation and some of those things together, if you want to. Here’s your locker, and these hooks are for you. You may have either bunk you wish, but I think you’ll find the lower one more convenient. Come on ashore now, and I’ll help you get your things aboard and get you settled. We sail to-morrow.”

That night at supper, which was deftly served at two bells by the Chinese steward, Harry was cordially welcomed by Captain Nickerson, and met the first mate, a lank, muscular man, bronzed and singularly taciturn, and learned much of his duties as supercargo, which he readily saw were nominal indeed. It was strange how easily he became adapted to life on board, and before bedtime he felt as if he had already lived a long time on a whaling ship. He stored his trunk and the “hoodoo” black bag in the city, and brought his belongings aboard in two canvas sacks, regular sailor’s bags, much to the approval of the two brawny Kanakas of the crew detailed to bring them down for him. Harry was much interested in these dusky South Sea islanders, and found them intelligent, good-natured, and efficient. Joe showed him over the ship, introduced him to the engineer and his assistant, and taught him much about the general working of the vessel. He saw the great kettles, set in brickwork on the forward deck, for the trying out of blubber. He saw the whaling implements, the bundles of staves for casks, and the great space between decks above and below for the storing of these when they should be coopered and filled with oil. He saw the galley where two slant-eyed Chinese were in charge, and the narrow quarters of the crew forward, crowded as much as possible to give more space in hold and on deck for oil casks, and for such members of the crew as he came in contact with he had a pleasant word.

THE LONG ROLLERS OF THE NORTH PACIFIC

Until Arctic whaling by way of Bering Sea began, few if any whalers were fitted with steam as an auxiliary; but it was found that if vessels were to make a success of the industry among the ice-floes of these treacherous waters, get into and out of the Arctic by the narrow, current-ridden, ice-tangled passage of Bering Straits, it was wise and expedient to add steam to the equipment. Hence many vessels like the Bowhead, though thorough-going sailing vessels, were equipped with engines and propeller, to be used when the wind did not serve, or when the passage of ice-floes made it necessary. It was under a full head of steam, then, that the Bowhead passed up Admiralty Inlet, as that portion of the Sound is called, rounded into the Straits of Fuca, and spread her sails to the westerly wind only when she was well out toward Cape Flattery, and breasting the long rollers that swung unimpeded from the vast expanse of the world’s greatest ocean.

How Harry’s heart had swelled within him at the sight of this sea! He had something of the feelings of Balboa when he first sighted it from that Central American mountain-top, and fell on his knees in adoration and thanksgiving. He longed like Captain Cook to furrow it with exploring keel, and seek out the enchanting mysteries that lie in and beyond the shores that it touches.

“Great sight, isn’t it, Harry?” said Captain Nickerson, who stood near him and noticed his emotion.

“Yes, sir,” replied Harry. “It seems like dreams coming true to think that I am to see the things that I have read about this side of the world, but never really expected to see with my own eyes.”

The captain smiled. “You’ll see strange sights, my boy, before you get home,” he said, and there was more of prophecy in this than either of them dreamed at the time.

“Are we liable to do any whaling right away?” asked Harry.

“Well, that depends,” replied the captain. “There is now and then a humpback in these waters, but they are pretty shy nowadays, and hard to come up with. They’re hardly worth while. I doubt if we shall lower a boat before we get into Bering Sea and get among the bowheads as they follow the ice up. We are likely to see a whale, though, most any time now.”

“I wish we could,” said Harry, the ardor of the sportsman beginning to thrill in his veins; but no whale appeared that day, though he watched the sea with patience and undiminishing ardor.

A day or two afterward, as he came on deck, he saw a little cloud on the surface of the water like the puff of smoke that follows the discharge of a rifle loaded with black powder. A moment after another puff shot into the air quite near the ship, and he saw beneath it a black body rise languidly to the surface, loll along it a moment, and then sink again. His heart gave a great jump. A whale! Why had none of the crew seen it? To be sure they were not on watch for whales, but still several were on deck, and the first mate, whose watch it was, was pacing leisurely back and forth behind him as he stood at the rail. The mate now and then glanced at the sails to see how they were drawing, and now and then shot a command, a single word if possible, to the crew for a pull on the braces, or something of that sort, but he seemed to take no notice of the puff of smoke and the black body just showing above the surface almost alongside. Harry looked again. Yes, it was there, so near that he could see that the little puff of smoke was a cloud or vapor blown with a whiff into the air from one end of this black body. He could stand it no longer, but rushed up to the mate, grasped his arm, pointed in the direction of his discovery, and said excitedly, “See, see! There he is! Don’t you see the whale?”

“Nope,” calmly replied the taciturn first mate, gazing at the little puff of vapor and the black body.

“Isn’t—isn’t it a whale?” faltered Harry, a little ashamed of his enthusiasm in the face of this stolidity.

“Nope,” said the first mate.

“But it looks like a whale,” persisted Harry; “and it acts like a whale, at least as I have read that they acted. What is it, then?”

“Blackfish,” said the mate, with a sweep of his hand to the other side of the ship. Harry looked in that direction, and was silent in astonishment and delight.

“Hundreds!” said the mate, and resumed his walk on the deck.

There were not so many as that, but there were certainly scores of these creatures sporting lazily in the waves, rolling their black bodies to glisten in the sun, and sending up the puffs of vapor that floated a moment in the breeze and then vanished. It reminded Harry of the skirmish line when the Cadets were encamped at Hingham, and the order “Fire at will” had been given. The puffs were much like those from the Springfield rifle.

The blackfish is really a whale, though the whalemen do not like to consider him as such or give him credit for it. He is small, not generally reaching a length of twenty feet, but otherwise he has all the characteristics of a whale. He blows, breathes, feeds, and lives in whale fashion. But he contains but a barrel or two of oil, of an inferior quality, and hence is beneath the notice of the average whaleman, though vessels in hard luck occasionally turn to and slaughter him rather than return to port empty. His meat, on the other hand, is better than whale meat, and is often esteemed a delicacy on a long whaling voyage when fresh meat from other sources has not been obtainable.

Some time afterward, as they were nearing the Aleutian Islands, Harry was to see his first “real whale,” and witness one of the fierce tragedies of the sea. He sat by the taffrail conning Bowditch’s Navigator, puzzling his way through the intricate and bewildering instructions as to the taking of the sun, the use of sextant and quadrant, the working out of longitude and latitude, while Joe, standing second mate’s watch as was his wont, paced the deck, and now and then passed a word with the boatswain. That worthy was sitting cross-legged near the rail amidships, busy with sailor’s needle and canvas rigging some chafing-gear for some of the lines, when he suddenly sprang to his feet and gazed intently over the bow toward the horizon. A moment he stood thus, and then the great tones of his voice rang out in the musical call:—

“A-h-h blow! There she blows! Whale—o!”

The ship sprang into bustle immediately. The watch on deck, which had been languidly busy over such small matters as the boatswain could devise to keep them at work, jumped into instant action, scurrying hither and thither to get the gear up and the boats in trim for a possible conflict. Those below came piling up on deck, and Joe sprang into the rigging, looking intently toward the spot where the whale was supposed to be. Harry gazed eagerly, but he could see nothing.

Captain Nickerson and the first mate appeared as suddenly from below, and the whole ship was activity and attention.

“Where is that whale?” asked the captain.

“Three points off the port bow, sir,” answered Joe; “about four miles, I think.”

“Good!” cried the captain. “Hold your course”—this to the man at the wheel.

He climbed into the mizzen rigging with Joe, and gazed through his glass in the direction indicated. A shade of disappointment came into his face.

“It’s an old bull humpback,” he said, “and I don’t believe we can get near him, but you may see that the first and second boats are in readiness, Mr. Jones.”

“Ay, ay, sir,” answered that man of brevity, using three words in the excitement of the moment; but there had been no need to give the order, for he had several of the crew busy doing just that very thing already. All had been keen in the hope that it would be a sperm whale.

Harry climbed into the rigging too, and as the ship drew toward the spot, he plainly saw an occasional puff as the monster breathed and sent a little cloud of vapor into the air. Steadily they approached the lazy leviathan, and by and by Harry could see his black head and hump, yet still the vessel kept her course, and the order to lower was not given.

“Hullo!” said the captain. “He’s gallied.”

What that might be Harry was not sure, though he took it to mean excited, for the animal suddenly surged forward, half out of water, swung a half circle on the surface with a great sweep of his mighty flukes, and began to forge through the water in their direction. As he did so, something flashed into the air behind him, and a black figure twenty feet long, shaped somewhat like another whale, seemed literally to turn a somersault from the surface, landing with a thud right on the back of the great humpback. The noise of the blow was plainly heard, though the whale was more than a half mile away. The humpback gave a sort of moaning bellow, and sounded.

“’Vast there with your boats,” cried the captain; “the killer has got ahead of us.”

The orca, or “whale-killer” as the whalers call him, is one of the most powerful and rapacious animals in the world. Himself a whale, he is the only one of the species that lives on other whales, and does not hesitate to attack the largest of them. He grows to a length of thirty feet, and his activity and strength are extraordinary. One of them has been known to take a full-grown dead whale that the whalemen had in tow, grasp it in his tremendous jaws, and carry it to the bottom, in spite of its captors. One does not have to believe an old writer who says that a killer has been seen with a seal under each flipper, one under the dorsal fin, and a third in his mouth. Eschrit, however, is reckoned reliable, and we have his authority that a killer has been captured, from the stomach of which were taken thirteen porpoises and fourteen seals. The killer is shaped much like a whale, has great jaws filled with sharp teeth, and a pointed dorsal fin, with which he is fabled to dive beneath a whale and rip up his belly. He is found in all seas, but is particularly numerous in the North Pacific. In the far north he pursues the beluga or white whale and the walrus. He captures the young walrus in a novel manner. The latter climbs on the back of the mother and the great ivory tusks keep the orca at bay, but he dives beneath the old one and comes up against her with such a blow that the young one falls from the rounded back of its mother, when it is immediately seized and crushed in the great jaws of the rapacious animal.

For a few moments nothing more was seen of either animal, and then, not his own length from the ship, the whale appeared, shooting up as if from a great depth, and flinging almost the whole of his great bulk straight into the air. The orca rose with him, his jaws set in the body of the whale just behind the left flipper. As the monster shook himself in agony, even when reared almost his whole length in the air, and with his great flukes beating the water beneath to foam, the hold of the orca was broken, and he fell back into the water beside the whale, leaving a great three-cornered tear in the whale’s side that dyed the water crimson as with another tremendous leap the wild wolf of the sea was again on his victim.

Again Harry heard that strange half moan, half bellow, as the frenzied humpback ploughed along the surface to windward, beaten by the blows of the orca as he flung himself into the air, and again and again came down like an enormous club on his victim’s back. And thus the unequal contest went on, and Harry watched them till they disappeared in the distance to windward. He was much impressed by the spectacle.

“How do you suppose it will come out?” he asked, as they clambered down from the rigging.

“The killer will get him, sure,” replied Captain Nickerson. “He will hammer him and worry him for miles, till he is completely exhausted. Then he will get a bite in his lip, and it will be all up with Mr. Humpback. By this time to-morrow as much of him as the orca does not want to eat right away will be floating belly up, and the sea birds and sharks will be busy with it.”

Two days afterward great banks of fog, with now and then a white peak gleaming through, showed that they were nearing the Aleutian Islands. The course was changed more to the northward, and the ship sailed into the windy, cloud-tormented reaches of Unalga Pass. Just as they reached the edge of the mists, the clouds lifted for a moment, and showed a scene of surpassing grandeur. The scarred and weather-beaten abrupt cliffs of the mountain sides rose from dark waters, that flashed green and white as they broke against the island sides, varying from dull red to deep crimson, streaked with vivid green of grasses and golden brown with lichens. Above these again swept the bare uplands, golden and olive with the tundra moss that clothes all to the farthest Arctic limits of the north, while over all, majestic and wonderful, lifting its crystal pinnacle eight thousand feet to the heavens, stood the mighty crest of Shishaldin, clothed white with unmelting snows, and tipped with a fluttering banner of smoke from the undying fires within. Shishaldin and Pogromnia, the one white as snow, the other dark with furrowed cliff and frozen lava, are chimneys to the banked fires of Unimak Island, in which slumber still, as they have slumbered since the white men first discovered them nearly two centuries ago, the mighty forces of eruption.

In the baffling currents and gusts of the pass sails were furled, and the ship proceeded under a full head of steam, skirting the lofty cliffs of Akutan. On this island once dwelt many thousand happy, contented Aleuts. They were great whalemen, and when the summer brought the humpback whales in schools to their turbulent waters, they captured many of them by bold but primitive hunting. Wisely, they did not attack the old whales, for the humpback is a famous fighter, and the white whalers rarely attack them in these dangerous waters to-day. Instead they picked out the agashitnak (yearlings) or akhoak (calves), and boldly attacked them in their two-holed bidarkas, made of walrus and seal skin stretched over driftwood framework. In the after-hole sat the paddler, and in the forward one the harpooner with his six-foot driftwood harpoon, tipped with an ivory socket bearing a notched blade of slate. This was thrust deep into the young whale and then withdrawn, leaving the socket and blade in his carcass. The mark of the hunter was scratched deep in this slate blade, that he might know it again. On being thus wounded the whale fled to sea, and there, as the Aleuts used to say, “went to sleep for three days.” Meanwhile watchers lined the cliffs, and watched through the scurrying fog for the currents to drift the carcass back to the island. Once perhaps in twenty times this happened, and then there was a feast and great rejoicing in the villages. The mark of the mighty hunter, inscribed on the blade, was found when the weapon was cut out, and he was honored for his feat during life, and even afterward. After his death, if he had been one of the very great men, his body was preserved, cut up, and rubbed on the blades of the young harpooners, that his valor and good fortune might be thus transmitted.

The villagers were bold sea hunters, but gentle and peaceable in their intercourse with one another, and so large were their villages that to-day the ruins of one of them front for nearly a mile on the beach. Over on Akun—another veritable volcanic mountain rising abruptly from the sea—were other prosperous villages, also of primitive whalemen. Here were boiling springs in which the villagers might cook their meat without fire, and the winter’s cold was in no wise to be feared because of the underground heat.

The humpbacks still school in summer about the islands of Akun and Akutan, and millions of whale birds swoop in black clouds above them. The little auks and parrot-bill ducks, as the sailors call the puffin, swarm upon the cliffs, and breed there as of old; but the Aleuts are gone from their ancient villages, and only a diseased remnant remains in favored spots in the once populous archipelago. On Akutan and Akun there are none. At Unalaska, or Illiluk as they called it, a remnant survives, their blood mingled with that of their exterminators, the Russians, and their sod huts cluster about the beautiful Greek church which they support. While the Bowhead lay at anchor in their harbor, Harry and Joe saw much of them, and found them so shy and gentle that it did not seem possible that they ever had risen in revolt against their fierce Cossack oppressors and swept them from the island; but such they did more than a century ago, only to be conquered and almost exterminated by fresh hordes of the invaders.

HARBOR OF UNALASKA

Like a necklace about the throat of Bering Sea, the Aleutian Islands swing in a cloud-capped circle of peaks to within about five hundred miles of the Siberian coast. The story of their discovery and exploitation by the Russians is one of romantic interest, thrilled through with horror at the needless oppression and slaughter of their gentle inhabitants. It was in the year 1740 that the Russians first sighted them, on the ill-fated expedition of Bering and his fellow commander Chirakoff. During the preceding centuries the little white sable known as the Russian ermine had led the wild Cossack huntsmen across the Siberian steppes to the shores of Kamchatka. The value of east Siberian furs in Russian markets was great, and when the wild huntsmen and traders reached the sea limit, they learned from the natives legends of land yet beyond, over-sea, where furs were still more plentiful. Accordingly, with a commission from the Russian court, Bering and Chirakoff fitted out two little vessels and set out upon these unknown seas on a voyage of discovery. Bering touched the mainland of Alaska, but soon started for home. Chirakoff visited several of the Aleutian Islands and finally reached Kamchatka again, after losing many of his crew from starvation and disease. Bering, however, was wrecked on the Commander Islands, just off the Gulf of Kamchatka, and died there, but after incredible hardships a remnant of his crew reached the mainland. They had been obliged to subsist on the flesh of the sea otter during their stay on the islands, and they brought back with them some of the pelts of the animals. These were received with great favor in Russia, and the high price offered for the skins gave a great impetus to further exploration of the islands, on which they abounded. Expedition after expedition was fitted out in crazy vessels, and the Promishlyniks, as the Russians called these savage huntsmen and voyagers, began to overrun the Aleutian chain.

Often their unseaworthy ships were wrecked in the gales which surge about the islands. Hunger and disease decimated their crews, and many an expedition started out boldly into the untried tempestuous waters, only to disappear and be no more heard from. Yet now and then an unseaworthy craft would escape the gales, and with half an emaciated crew return, the ship loaded down with many thousands of sea otter, fox, and seal skins, meaning great wealth to the survivors. Nothing could exceed the boldness and hardihood of these men. The half-starved, disease-smitten remnants of the unsuccessful crews would immediately dare the myriad dangers again in a new expedition, so great was their courage and so tempting the prize. We have scant records of the expeditions, yet in those of which we know the misery and death, even when success resulted, is appalling. Yet they kept on, and the boldness and hardihood of the Cossack hunter-mariners were equaled only by their rapacity and cruelty. Invariably met with goodwill and hospitality on the part of the natives of the mountainous islets, their return was invariably oppression and cruelty in the extreme. A busy, contented, hospitable people swarmed in the sheltered coves of the rocky isles when the invasion began. Within thirty years but scattered remnants were left, enslaved, diseased, discouraged. Once only, on Unalaska, they took advantage of the winter and slaughtered their oppressors who remained on the island, but with the spring came new hordes, and they were obliged to sue for peace, with slavery.

This uprising took place in the winter of 1763, and the story of the escape of two of the Promishlyniks, driven to the mountains, at bay on a rocky headland, concealed in a cave, fleeing alongshore in a captured canoe, always with tremendous odds against them, yet always winning in the unequal fight, is an extraordinary one.

Most of the Aleutian Islands to-day are barren, and desolate of inhabitants. Few if any Russians remain, and but a handful of Aleuts. Moreover, the greed of a century and a half has practically exterminated the sea otter. Once so common that it might be killed with a club, the animal is to-day one of the most wary known, and the price of a single skin is a fortune to the Aleut hunter, of whom a few still seek for the prized fur. The Russian domination passed with the sale of Alaska to the United States. The American domination is kindly, but the Aleut does not thrive, and it seems but a few more years before he will have passed into the category of races that have faded before the advance of the white man.

The Bowhead made only a brief stay at Unalaska. Here some coal was added to their supply, and store of fresh water was taken from the reservoir, established by one of the big trading companies that have stations there, at the seal islands, and at St. Michaels, at the mouth of the Yukon River. Then the anchor was hoisted, they steamed out of Captain’s Bay, by the strange headland, Priest Rock, which marks its entrance, and with a southerly wind in the sails left the clouds and snowy peaks behind. Their prow was set toward the mysterious north, and already the man on the lookout was on the watch for the blink of Bering Sea ice not yet melted by the spring sun.

CHAPTER III
BUCKING ICE IN BERING SEA

Harry sat at the mess-room table one morning a few days later, writing the first chapter in what he rather shyly called his “report.” He had learned much from Captain Nickerson of the habits of the humpback whale, which frequents the Aleutian Islands, and the dangerous circumstances under which vessels would work while whaling in these waters. The captain had declared that it was not worth while to hunt the humpback, that the dangers and losses would more than balance the gain, and Harry believed him. Nevertheless it was on such things as these that Mr. Adams wanted knowledge, and so he was jotting down what he had learned.

The old humpbacks are born fighters. The shoals and currents, the fogs and gales, of the islands are their allies, and right well do they know how to take advantage of them. Once an iron is fast to a humpback, his first impulse is to turn and crush the puny boat which has stung him. Failing in this, he rushes to a shoal, and rolling on the bottom tries to roll the iron out, or he swings in and out the narrow, reef-studded passages, and often wrecks the boat that is fast to him. Even if he fails in all these attempts and is killed, the swift currents and the fog which surrounds make the bringing of the carcass to the ship difficult and dangerous. Hence, now that the Aleuts have passed from the islands, he is left to pursue his ways in peace. “Why bother with him,” say the whalemen, “when just a little way to the northward are the bowheads, far more valuable, and as a rule killed almost without a struggle?”

Now and then Harry lifted his head from his work to listen to a peculiar grating sound that seemed to come from the side of the ship. It was the same sound that a small boat makes when it touches a gravelly bottom, and he noted also that steam was up on the vessel, and knew by the slow pulsations of the screw that they were proceeding at half speed. He was curious about all this, but decided that he would finish his work before he went on deck. Then a faint, far-away cry came to his ear. The man at the masthead had sung out—“A-h-h blow!”

The next cry was neither faint nor far, for it came from the mighty lungs of the great boatswain. “Whale—o!” he shouted; “tumble up lively, lads. There’s a bowhead out here in the ice.”

Harry tumbled up lively, indeed, but he was at the heels of the members of the crew, who had been below at the call, for all that. He found himself in a new world. During the early morning hours the ship had entered the southern edge of the Bering Sea ice, and was steaming steadily northward into it. Thus far the ice was neither thick nor in force, scattered floes to the right and left leaving open leads through which the vessel pressed, rubbing her sides against floating fragments as she passed. It was this scattered “slush” that had made the grating sound on the ship’s side. A big bowhead was playing leisurely along in the broken ice some distance ahead, now diving beneath a floe, now appearing in an open space, feeding, and unconscious of danger. The open water and the ice round about was no longer the clear green which it had been, but was turbid with a brownish substance like mother-of-vinegar.

“What’s that stuff?” asked Harry.

“Whale food,” answered Joe; “the sea is full of it about here at this time of year.”

“Well, I’m glad I’m not a whale,” said Harry; “I’d hate to eat that.” The brown, muddy, clotted messes were even frozen into the ice. They consist of minute forms of low-grade animal life, and are certainly not palatable in appearance. Yet the bowhead is fond of them. He sculls along with his mouth wide open, the bone in his upper jaw reaching down to his lower lip on either side, and making of his mouth a cavern into which food, water, and all enter. Once the great mouth is full he pushes his enormous spongy tongue up into it, squeezes the water out through the whalebone sieve, and swallows the food left behind.

One bell sounded in the engine-room. The throb of the screw ceased, and the Bowhead glided gently along an open space of water toward her namesake.

“That fellow will go sixty barrels, and a good lot of bone,” said Captain Nickerson. “Lower away there!”

Two whaleboats were swung over the side, the first mate in charge of one, Captain Nickerson in the other. Joe was left behind, nominally in charge of the ship, and Harry, of course, remained with him. His nerves were a-tingle with the excitement of the chase, and he ardently wished he might be in one of the two boats.

“Hard luck, isn’t it?” said Joe, who noticed his excitement. “Tell you what, we’ll get ready for a strike ourselves. There’s likely to be more than one bowhead about, and we’ll get up some gear in case they want more of it. Here, Billy,”—this to one of the Kanakas on deck,—“get up a couple of tubs of that extra line.”

“There’s no knowing how soon we’ll want another boat away. I’ll get up another bomb gun and a supply of ammunition. Then we’ll be heeled, as they say in Frisco.”

Harry handled the bomb gun when it arrived,—a short, ponderous weapon of brass, clumsy indeed to one accustomed to handle an ordinary rifle or shotgun, but very efficient in the service for which it is intended. Joe showed him how it was used, and even loaded it, placing it carefully against the rail. The two boats, zigzag fashion, approached the whale through the floes, the captain’s much in advance, and finally came up with him. Cautiously they glided on till the bow of the foremost just grazed the black back. Then the harpooner, with a mighty thrust, sent the iron deep into the blubber, and the boat backed rapidly away.

“The gun missed fire! The gun missed fire!” shouted Joe excitedly; “they’ll lose him!”

So it seemed, for there was no sound of an explosion, only the welt of the whale’s flukes on the water as he sprang into action at the thrust of the harpoon. With this one great splash he went below the surface, sounded, as the whalemen say, and there was no sign of his presence except the two boats and the rapidly whizzing line as it ran out through the chock.

“They’re heading this way,” said Harry; and so they were, the captain’s boat standing bow on beside a floe, with the line whizzing against the edge of the ice, and the first mate’s men pulling with all their strength toward the ship. Then they heard the warning shout from the captain,—

“Watch for him, we’ve parted.” The rough edge of ice had cut the line, and the whale was free.

The bowhead’s chances for getting away were good. He would come to the surface again only for a breath, and then continue his flight to safety in the distant ice fields. But now came one of those happenings which prove how wise it is to be prepared for any emergency. Joe, in getting up that extra gear and the gun, had unwittingly saved the day. As both boys stood by the rail gazing toward the boats, there came a crash in the weak ice just alongside, a black bulk crushed up through it, and with a gasp like that of a steam exhaust a puff of vapor shot up right in their faces.

“There he is! There he is!” yelled Joe frantically; “give it to him!”

With the words he snatched up the iron at his side, and hurled it downward with all his strength into the head of the whale, where it stuck quivering. At the same time Harry, yelling like mad in his excitement, caught up the bomb gun, put it to his shoulder as if it were a toy, and discharged it full into the middle of the black mass, which he saw as through a mist heaving in the crushed ice. There was a dull, heavy sound of a muffled explosion, and the whale quivered and stopped. Then came a wild hurrah from the ship, and an answering one from the boats. The boatswain sprang up the short ladder from amidships to their side.

“Mighty good, young fellers,” he shouted, almost as excited as they; “you plunked him fair, and just one chance out of a thousand. Whoop! but we’re a whaling crew. Greenhorn bagged the first bull right from the quarter deck. Whoop!”

The bowhead lay motionless, evidently dead, and the boatswain made the line fast to a cleat. Then he sang a variation of an old sea chantey, cutting a ponderous pigeon wing to the tune—

“Tra la la, tra la la, tra la la boom,

Lorenzo was no sailor,

Tra la la, tra la la, tra la la boom,

He shipped on board a whaler.”

“’Vast there, bosun,” he said to himself, suddenly sober; “no monkeyshines on the quarter-deck. Get down amidships where you belong. Hi there, you Kanakas! clear away that cuttin’-in gear. Step lively now, they’re alongside.”

The boats were no sooner at the davits than preparations for cutting-in the whale were made. He was hauled alongside, head toward the stern, and a heavy tackle was rigged to the mainmast head. Then the cutting-in stage of planking, rigged so as to swing from the side of the ship out over the carcass, was put outboard. Two men, each with the great steel chisel which the whalemen call a spade, took stations on this. A longitudinal slit was cut in the blubber just back of the flipper. Then cuts were made from this round the carcass, a hook from the tackle was made fast in the end of the strip, and hoisting away on the tackle the blubber was peeled from the dark meat beneath in a spiral peeling, somewhat as one might peel an apple. As the weight on the tackle grew great, the strip was cut away and hoisted upon the deck amidships. Meanwhile, others of the crew had started fires beneath the great kettles forward, and the blubber, cut into small cubes, was put in these. At first this fire was of wood, but as the work progressed the scraps from the blubber were thrown into the grate and burned fiercely, giving off a thick black smoke that had a disagreeable odor of burnt flesh.

By and by the blubber was all aboard, filling the space between decks with its quivering oily masses, among which the crew plunged and worked like demons. The furnaces spouted smoke and oil, and remnants of blubber made the decks slippery. Last of all the tackle was carefully made fast to the head, and the ship listed to one side as the donkey engine put a strain on the great mass. Then the great backbone was severed by the spades, and the tense tackle sang as the enormous bulk was swung inboard and landed safely on the deck.

“What for goodness’ sake is that in his mouth?” asked Harry.

“That’s the bone,” replied Joe; “and a fine head of bone it is. Some of the slabs are eight or nine feet long.”

“Well, I never thought whalebone looked like that,” said Harry, gazing in astonishment at the black slabs varying in length from one foot to eight that extended down from the upper jaw. They were flattened, nearly a foot in greatest diameter at the base, and tapering to a thin tip. This was fringed far up on the sides with what resembled horsehair.

“Can he shut his mouth with all that in it?” asked Harry.

“Oh, yes,” replied Joe. “The tips fit into the groove between the tongue and the lip, and point backward when he shuts his jaws. They are very elastic, as you know, and they spring and bend close together.”

The boatswain and the mate busied themselves cutting out these slabs of bone, which were piled away to be cleansed before stowing them. The boatswain was jovial and talkative. He sang snatches of sea songs, made jokes, and tried to draw out his companion as they worked; but the taciturn mate was as silent as ever. Not so Harry and Joe, who put on oil-skins and worked with them. After the bone was removed, the head was tipped overboard, and floated away with the stripped and abandoned carcass. Arctic gulls had gathered in troops from no one knew where, and dogfish were already nibbling at it. It would not be many days before the meat would be stripped from the bones, and the latter resting on the shallow bottom of Bering Sea.

“Pity the mersinkers could not have that meat,” said the boatswain. “It would make a feast for a whole village for a week.”

“Who are the mersinkers?” asked Harry.

“The natives over at East Cape,” said the boatswain; “that’s what they call themselves. You’ll see them in a day or two, probably.”

The twilight of early June lasts in Bering Sea until almost eleven o’clock; then flares were lighted of scraps and blubber in wire baskets, making torches that lighted up the gloom with weird, fantastic glare, and still the work of trying out went on. The men loomed in and out of the shadows like strange goblins at uncanny sport. The fires illumined a brief circle of the desolate ice, and showed only a part of the rigging which made ladders into an unknown gloom, and the whole was like a midnight assembly of goblins of the strange ice world, working spells about witch kettles that far outdid the wild work of the witch sisters in “Macbeth.” The brief night had passed, and the morning sun was shining on the ice again, yet the incantations did not cease, and it was two days before the last of the bowhead’s oil was stowed in casks below decks. Then only the weary crew had a brief rest, before the ship was cleaned and scrubbed down. Nearly a thousand pounds of whalebone was the most valuable result of this first catch, and as the market price of bone at San Francisco was something over three dollars a pound, Harry had matter of interest to jot down in his report as to the methods and profits of the pursuit of the bowhead.

The vessel now found herself in the middle of the Bering Sea pack ice. Here and there were open leads still, but they were fewer, more narrow, and much less connected. Now and again there were places where contrary winds and currents had crushed the floes together, piling the crumpled cakes high on one another in wild confusion, often to a height of twenty or thirty feet. Joe called these hummocks icebergs, and Harry and he had much friendly controversy as to the correct use of that term. Harry explained that he had learned that icebergs were the product of glaciers alone, that there were no glaciers on the Alaskan coast north of the Aleutians, and that these should properly be called hummocks. In this he was right, but Joe, with the pride of the man who “has been there,” would not concede it. Whatever they were, they totally prevented the progress of the vessel, and when they appeared in the path, the Bowhead was obliged to make a detour to avoid them. Now and then they were obliged to “buck ice” to get from one lead to another, and the process was very exciting. The vessel under a full head of steam would plunge straight at the field of heavy ice, striking it with a thump that entirely stopped progress and shook the structure from stem to stern. The masts would spring under the blow, and at each shock Harry fully expected to see Captain Nickerson jolted from his perch in the crow’s nest, high on the fore-mast. Then the ship would back away again at the captain’s order, leaving a three-cornered dent in the ice. Again and again she would rush at this dent with her great weight under full head of steam, till the floe would split, and leave a narrow crack through which the vessel could crowd her way. Thus for several days they hammered their way on through the pack, until they reached its northwestern edge, where open water gave them free passage to the ice-bound shores of east Siberia. There they came to anchor under a headland, and though it was mid-June and did not seem cold, were greeted by a storm of snow that came scurrying down from the snow-clad hills inland.

BUCKING THE ICE

Next day it cleared, and the skin topeks of a Chuckchis village could be seen on the barren shore. A strip of shore ice still separated them from the land, but the natives came dragging their umiaks across this and then put to sea in them, soon paddling alongside. There were a dozen or more in each boat, men, women, and children, all clad much alike in walrus-hide seal-top boots, sealskin trousers, and a hooded coat of reindeer fur which extended nearly to the knee. Men and women and the older children alike paddled, and the walrus-hide boats made rapid progress over the waves. Once alongside they made fast and came aboard, all hands, smiling and silent, sitting or standing for a time until addressed by some one who was or seemed to be in authority. Then they spoke, and conversation was soon general. It was limited, however. Many of the men know considerable English of the “pigeon” variety, and most of the whalers are familiar with the trade language of the Eskimos of Bering Sea and the straits, which consists of Eskimo, mingled with words and phrases picked up from the whalers and traders, and originating Heaven knows where. Possibly some are Kanaka words transplanted far north. Others are words invented by the sailors on the spur of the moment, which, once applied by the natives, have been adopted into general use.

Each native had a sealskin poke which he carried slung over his shoulder by a rawhide thong, and which consisted of the skin of the ordinary Arctic seal taken off whole, and tanned with the hair on. A slit was cut in the side of this, making a sort of traveling-bag, in which he carried articles which he was to offer for trade. Within these pokes were walrus tusks, plain and carved, some elaborately; walrus teeth carved into grotesque imitations of little animals; “muckalucks,” the trade word for the native skin-boot; “artekas,” or coats of reindeer skin; furs of ermine, mink, otter, and the hair seal; in fact, anything which the mersinker could find at home that he thought the whalemen might fancy. None of these goods were offered on deck, however. Each waited until the captain, sitting in state in his cabin, sent for him; then one by one they went down to trade. After each man had made what bargain he could with Captain Nickerson, he brought what was left to the deck, and there traded freely with the sailors.

As supercargo, Harry sat in the cabin with Captain Nickerson, and kept account of each trade as it was made, having good opportunity to watch the methods of the natives. He found them very clever at barter, Captain Nickerson, Yankee that he was, often meeting his match in some stolid native, who seemed to have a very clear idea of what he wanted, and how to get it. The first day of trading was merely preliminary, however, the natives bringing off their least valuable goods for barter, reserving the best of the ivory, and all the bone, until they found how prices were going, and whether the ship held such supplies as they needed or not. Their first demand seemed to be for hard bread, of which they are very fond. For this they offered, as a rule, the muckaluck, or native boot. Calico, as they had learned to call all forms of cloth, came next; then flour in bags, and later ammunition, rifles, and trade goods. Of brown sugar they were desirous, and chewing tobacco was asked for almost as soon as the hard-tack. This they called kowkow tobacco, or eating tobacco, from their trade word “kowkow,” meaning to eat. Harry made note of the Eskimo words as he heard them used, and picked up a working vocabulary, with the help of his notebook, in a very short time. Before the first day’s trading was over he had begun to understand what was meant, and by the end of the third day he astonished Joe with his fluency. As a matter of fact, his vocabulary thus far consisted of only forty words or so; but as they were the ones in most constant use, it made him seem quite a linguist. From this time forward he took great pains to jot down a new word and its meaning as soon as he heard it, getting many from the officers and crew, and this quick acquisition of the language was to stand him in good stead later on.

At the end of the third day trading had ceased. There were great piles of deerskins, muckalucks, and small furs, several hundred pounds of not very good bone, quite a quantity of ivory, and many trinkets and curios. Harry wondered greatly as to the destination of much of this stuff.

“Are reindeer skins worth much in the States?” he asked Captain Nickerson once, as the pile grew larger at the expense of much flour and calico.

“I don’t think there is any market,” replied the captain, “though it is hard to see why. The fur is very thick and warm, the skin light, and should make most excellent lap robes and carriage robes, just as the buffalo fur once did. We shall trade them again when we meet the Eskimos on the other side of the straits. The caribou is scarce over there, and they gladly exchange fox, ermine, and bear skins for them. These we can dispose of readily in Frisco.”

A good quantity of bone was in hand, but it was only a part of what the natives had taken, as the captain knew. Two whales had been their good fortune as the ice came down the fall before, and a third had come to them that spring as the gift of the orcas. These eat the lip and the soft tongue of the bowhead, leaving the carcass to float ashore. Hence the mersinker looks upon the orca with a sort of veneration as a provider of great and valuable gifts, and has certain ceremonies which he goes through each year as an invocation to him and an expression of gratitude. The mersinker, in fact, is a man of many ceremonials, the reason for which he does not know, but which he follows because his father did the same before him. These three whales had been small ones, but there must have been far more bone from them than the natives brought to the ship for sale. The balance they were keeping back for further trading with other ships, nor was it possible to get them to bring this out, even by offering increased value for it. They held it in reserve, as is their custom, hoping that the next ship would bring goods which they would care for more than those at hand.

Captain Nickerson wished to purchase some reindeer for fresh meat, but none were at the coast. The deermen were said to be stationed in a valley half a dozen miles in the interior, and he decided to send an expedition inland in search of some. A coast native volunteered as guide, and brought along a sledge and dog team for the transportation of supplies. Mr. Jones, the taciturn first mate, was detailed in command of this expedition, and Harry and Joe were allowed to go, with many injunctions to be careful not to get into trouble with the Chow Chuen, as the deermen call themselves.

It was a perfect June day when they set off. There was no breath of wind, and the sun shone brilliantly as they landed on the shore ice, transferred their supplies to the sledge, and set off through the native village toward the hills. They had instructions not to be gone longer than over one night, and it was agreed that a signal of trouble and need of assistance should be three shots repeated in quick succession. Such precautions were necessary as the Chow Chuen, though generally willing to barter, are of uncertain temper, and even the mersinkers are not to be trusted when they seem to have an advantage. Harry and Joe tramped on ahead of the company, the Eskimo following with his team and sledge, and Mr. Jones bringing up the rear. The air was warm, and on bare spots the spring grass was already growing through the tundra moss, but the snow still covered most of the earth, and the trail lay across it, well trodden.

Each boy carried a rifle and was well supplied with cartridges, while Harry had in addition a small camera slung over his shoulder by a strap. The boys were in high glee at the outing, after the long confinement aboard ship, and rollicked along well ahead of the others. Yet their progress was slow, the way winding, and it was lunch time and yet they had not reached the upland valley, where the camp of the deermen was said to be. A few dry twigs of willow—the only growth of wood, and this in the main creeping vine fashion, and rising only to a height of two or three feet—were found to feed a fire, and a pot of tea was boiled. Then after the men had taken a hasty smoke, the journey was resumed. It was mid-afternoon when they seemed to be reaching the summit of a low divide. The six miles had stretched into a dozen, and there was no sign of human life among the hills, only the beaten trail leading steadily on over the snow. The mate had seemed anxious for an hour or so, and had swung into the lead along with the boys.

“Home pretty soon,” he said, wasting no words; “most far enough.” A moment after, they rounded a ledge of broken basaltic rock, and looked down upon a scene of pastoral life such as only the extreme north of Asia can show. A brown and sheltered valley wound among the rude hills. It was bare of snow in the main, and the golden brown moss, with which it was carpeted, showed green with grasses already springing in it. In scattered groups about this grazed several hundred reindeer, many brown in color, some piebald, the old ones bearing branching antlers, the fawns spotted, and gamboling like any young deer. Here and there, fur-clad herders watched them, and there was a little group of large skin topeks at one side of the valley not far off, the homes of the herders and their families. Thither they turned, the coast native taking the lead now. They were near the little hut hamlet before any one took notice of them, when a man suddenly appeared with a rifle in his hands. He was taller than the coast native, and seemed more robust. He fearlessly pointed the rifle at the approaching party.

“Way enough!” shouted Mr. Jones. “Hold water!”

At a wave of his hand the Eskimo went ahead resolutely, his hands held up palm forward as a sign of peace, and shouting, “Nagouruk! Nagouruk!”

The deerman lowered the muzzle of his rifle, and the two talked for a moment. Then the Eskimo made a sign for the party to come forward. The deerman met them with the word “Nagouruk,” which means “Good,” in token of friendship, and talked with the Eskimo volubly in a dialect that no one in the party could make much of. The other, who could speak some English, explained that it was doubtful if deer could be bought. It had been a bad winter, many had died in the deep snow, and they wished to let the herd increase during the spring and summer, lest they face starvation next winter. In any case, it would be necessary to consult the head deerman, and he would send for him.

“Watch out,” said Mr. Jones to Joe and Harry. “Don’t like this gang.”

The deermen’s topeks numbered about half a dozen, scattered along the sunny side of an abrupt turn in the cliff which bordered the valley’s edge. The deerman lifted the flap of one of these, and motioned them to enter. A crowd of curious women and children, the smaller of these latter perched on their mothers’ shoulders astride their necks, had begun to gather. Men came running up from the other topeks, and the little party was soon being stared at, criticised, and even poked and hustled, in half-curious, half-insolent fashion. The Chow Chuen are certainly no respecters of persons. They hate and distrust the white man, but they do not fear him.

Mr. Jones hesitated. Then he motioned to Harry to stand by the sled. “Stand watch, will you?” he said. “Keep ’em off. Don’t get gallied.”

Harry, rifle in hand, took his stand by the sled, while the other three entered the topek. The Alaskan coast native builds a small summer shelter, but the Siberian coast native, and the deermen of the uplands inland, build great ones, sometimes thirty feet in diameter. These are covered with skins, held down with rawhide ropes and stone weights against the furious gales of that country. Within is a central common space surrounded by smaller rooms, made by deerskin curtains. They found this central room empty, but a rustling behind the curtains showed that the others were tenanted. The deerman bade them wait and went out, soon returning with another of his kind who seemed to be the head man, and followed by half a dozen others. Then the bargaining began, the Eskimo acting as interpreter, and signs filling up the spaces where words failed.

Meanwhile, Harry was very busy outside, and somewhat worried. The entire population of the hamlet seemed bent on investigating him thoroughly. They made derisive remarks about his clothing, and tried to put their hands in his pockets, which they seemed to admit to one another were good things to have. One man took off his hat and started to put it on his own head, amid laughter from his comrades. He seemed to resent it when Harry snatched it away, and touched his knife significantly. But when one attempted to relieve him of his watch and chain he was forced to draw back hastily, for Harry felt that the limit of patience was about reached, and cocked and pointed his rifle threateningly. The others seemed to enjoy the hurried retreat of this man, and to deride him for cowardice. However, the men kept out of arm’s reach after this. Not so the women and children. Their attentions were not only to himself, but to the sled; and he soon saw that under their carelessness was a systematic attempt to cast off the lashings and get at the goods there. During all this annoyance he happened to think of his camera, and decided that at least he could get a picture or two to counterbalance the trouble. So, unslinging it from his back, he slipped the little instrument from its case, drew out the bellows to the universal focus, and proceeded to point it at the most picturesque of the insolent group. The effect was magical. They tumbled backward from the machine with alarm. When they saw the flick of the shutter as he pressed the button, they threw their hands before their eyes and retreated, repeating a word which he did not understand, but which he learned later meant “magic.”

This amused Harry greatly, and afterward he had only to point the camera to widen the circle about him; and to take a new picture was to send arms flying to the faces that were in range. They seemed to think something would come from it to injure their eyesight. They resented this threat, however, and there were black looks on the ugly faces of the men when the mate and the head deerman appeared from the topek followed by the others. The bargain had been satisfactorily concluded, and the deermen went off to drive in the purchased reindeer, while Jones and his lieutenants took the goods from the sled. The crowd of fur-clad Chow Chuen stood about, but kept a respectful distance from the camera.

But when the half-dozen deer were driven up, there were fresh complications. Mr. Jones was about to slaughter them at once, and had passed the goods over to the head deerman, when a great outcry arose. The deermen flocked about the Eskimo, and seemed to demand that he tell the whites something, which he did.

“No kill. No kill,” cried the Eskimo in much alarm; “Chow Chuen kill.”

“Well, tell them to go ahead and do it, then,” roared Mr. Jones, so angry that he was fluent. “It’s nightfall now, and we’ve got a long road ahead of us.”

The Eskimo was much disturbed. He explained, with a strange mingling of Eskimo with his scant English vocabulary, that there was a ceremonial to be gone through with first. It could not be done at nightfall, they must wait the rising sun. “One sleep,” he said. “Nanaku kile. Bimeby he come,” pointing to the sun. “Mucky” (Dead), with a sweep of his hand toward the reindeer.

In vain Mr. Jones stormed with picturesque and unexpectedly voluble profanity; the deermen were determined. The head deerman ordered the goods brought out and laid at the feet of the company, scornfully waving his hand toward the home trail, indicating plainly that they might consider the trade off, but he would not have the deer slaughtered then. Mr. Jones would not return without them, and so they waited.

“Tell him,” he said sulkily, “we’ll wait till sunrise.”

The Eskimo explained, and this seemed to clear matters somewhat. Some tobacco offered them helped still more; and the head man drove the crowd away, evidently telling them to go about their business, which they did reluctantly. He conducted the party down the line of topeks to one which was near the end, and told them that that was to be their habitation for the night.

“We’ll stand watch and watch,” said Mr. Jones, as they entered this; “no knowing what these rapscallions will try to do to us, if we all go to sleep.”

The interior of this smaller topek was all one room, and there were no traces of former occupancy, which was satisfactory. It gave promise of reasonable cleanliness, which could not be said of the others. It was no doubt a storehouse not in present use. The sled, their blankets, and belongings were hauled inside; the dogs were tied to the tent-poles outside, and the Eskimo disposed of himself as best he might. Joe stood the first watch, while Harry and Mr. Jones rolled themselves in blankets on the mossy floor of the topek and were soon asleep. It was still light, though the sun was behind the northern mountains. Indeed, in June in that latitude, there is but a brief interval of dusk at midnight. The deermen retired to their topeks, except those on watch with the herd, and save for the howl of an occasional wolf-like dog, peace reigned.

At midnight Joe woke Harry, and he went on guard. A gray dusk hung over everything, there was a sharp chill in the air. All things seemed touched with a white fungous growth, which was frost. From behind the northern mountains the sun shot dancing streamers like aurora halfway up the sky. The whole scene was beautiful but strange, and gave Harry a sense of the ghostly and supernatural which was hard to shake off, and which he was often to feel still more vividly as he saw more of Arctic nights. The prowling, howling bands of Chow Chuen dogs loomed large in the uncertain light, and it seemed hard not to believe that they were bands of wolves bent on destruction. He was glad indeed when the first glimpse of the sun came over the mountains to the northeast, and it was time to call Mr. Jones. The night had passed, and they were not molested.

A SIBERIAN TOPEK

With the sunrise the whole hamlet was astir for the ceremony of the slaughter of the reindeer. The six deer purchased were led up, and the shaman of the village appeared from his lodge, which was decorated with strange devices and carved images. He held in his hand a long, sharp knife, and as he passed Harry the boy inadvertently drew back, so fierce and sinister was the look on his evil face. Each deer in turn was led up to him and faced to the east. The shaman held his knife toward the sun, recited something that seemed like a liturgy, then with one thrust sent the keen knife full to the heart of his victim. With a bleat the animal fell to its knees, then rolled over dead, and the shaman, rushing forward, caught the blood from the wound in his palm, scattering it toward the sun with more words, or perhaps the same, of the ritual. Thus each deer was slain, and in a twinkling was fallen upon by the Chow Chuen and the entrails removed. The bodies were then placed on the sled, and it was evident that the adventurers might take their departure, which they were glad to do. A mile or two down the trail they breakfasted on deer steak, broiled over the few willow twigs they were able to find, and went on, reaching the ship at midday. Captain Nickerson received them gladly and was pleased at their success, but had a long conference with the Eskimo. Then only they learned that the treacherous and ugly Chow Chuen had been much incensed at their wish to take the deer and slaughter them without the legendary rites of the tribes, and would have attempted to murder them during the night. The Eskimo had dilated upon the strange power of the little “magic box,” which he told them could take each man’s image and carry it away (he having seen photographs taken with a similar one by previous visiting white men), and crafty and superstitious as they are fierce, the deermen wisely decided to let the strangers alone. No doubt the fact that they stood armed watch had its effect as well.

The next day a southeasterly gale sprang up, and the vessel was obliged to hoist anchor and get away from the dangerous coast.

CHAPTER IV
THE LITTLE MEN OF THE DIOMEDES

In the unremembered ages it is probable that the extreme end of Asia, which is East Cape, Siberia, was joined to the extreme western end of America, which is Cape Prince of Wales, Alaska. No tradition remains of the time when the sea broke through this slender barrier, yet even now it is but about thirty miles in a straight line across, and on clear days from the mountains of one promontory the other can be faintly discerned. There is a halfway station, too, two storm-beaten islands which lift rocky crests of grim granite in the very middle of the hurly-burly of the straits. These are the Diomede Islands, the greater belonging to Russia, the lesser to America, and the space between the two is so narrow that it seems in bright weather as if one could almost throw a stone across, though in reality it is more than a mile—farther than it looks. Across this slender land path in those forgotten years came one race after another from Central Asia, which was the birthplace of races, pressing southward and peopling the Western hemisphere with tribes, of which scant traces remain in some instances, while in others their degenerate descendants are still fading before the westward rush of civilization. Individuals cross this narrow barrier of tempestuous sea still, but races come no more, and we find on the halfway station of the Diomedes a remnant of some ancient people that has stranded there and made a home where it seems scarcely possible that human creatures could live the year round.

Here during the recent centuries met the Asiatic and Alaskan Eskimos, to trade and fight; and the bold, bare cliffs have been the scene of many a bloody battle. Now even this custom has passed, and the men from one side of the straits rarely meet those of the other; but the little remnant of an unknown people, who stranded there no one knows how long ago, still cling to their rocky islets and live as did their forefathers. You may find among them some who bear the mark of the Chuckchis, some who are more like the Alaskan Eskimos, but the little folk, while having the manners and customs of each, have characteristics which belong to neither. Hardly five feet in height, they are too small to have battled successfully with their more robust brethren, but they make up in slyness and ability what they lack in brute strength. They are shy and reticent, clever workmen, clever thieves, and cleverest of all in trading.

No vegetation save grass and chickweed grows on their cliffs. They build their dwellings of flat stones banked with scant earth, and the icy sea, which rims them round and seems to threaten with certain death, is their father and their mother in that it provides all they have in the world. In the brief summer an occasional log of driftwood is thrown against their cliffs, and from this they fashion their canoe frames and their spear handles. During all the cold and cruel winter the ice-floes which crash and grind against the worn granite of their islands bring the seal and walrus and the polar bear. These and the myriad sea birds of summer are their supplies.

For many days the southerly gale which had driven the Bowhead from the Siberian shore kept her in much danger. The sea room was narrow, ice-floes came driving down before the wind, it was impossible to get sight of the sun to find the ship’s position, and the drift of the current toward the straits was an unknown factor. Most of the time the vessel jogged under reefed topsails, with steam up for use in an emergency, and Captain Nickerson was almost constantly on deck. Thick clouds made the nights longer, and very dark, and Harry had a chance to see the full danger of Arctic navigation.

It was in the gloom of one of these nights that he stood on deck. The vessel heeled to the gale, now and then an icy wave sent a rush of spray over the windward rail, the wind howled and wailed in the tense shrouds, and an eerie glow seemed to show in the darkness without lighting it, as if dull fires burned behind the cloud curtains. It seemed to Harry as if they were blown about in chaos, a place dreary, ghostly, and lonely beyond expression. He shuddered and thought of the people at home, happy in the bright June weather. For the first time he was sorry for himself, and homesick. He thought with a great longing of the broad veranda looking out upon the bay, of his mother sitting there, and he seemed with his mind’s eye to see Maisie, in a pretty white gown, flitting gayly across the lawn toward the boats. Then out of the night came a wild, despairing cry, and something fluttered aboard, crashed against the mizzen rigging, and fell in a draggled white heap at his feet. The thought of Maisie was so strong that he sprang forward, with a great cry of alarm, to pick her up where she had fallen, when a sudden tremendous gust of the gale threw the Bowhead on her beam ends. A wall of white water roared down upon him, lifted him up with Maisie in his arms, and he went out into the night with it, still clinging to the limp figure he had clutched as he went down.

It was well for Harry that the same sea that sent him overboard sent with him a coil of line from a belaying-pin, where it hung against the mizzenmast. The whirl of the wave wound this round him, and the great boatswain, whose watch on deck it was, saw him go out with it, and finding it taut, and something towing, hauled away at it until he could reach down and get him by the collar. Then with one big swing of his enormous arm he landed him aboard. He set him in a heap on the deck, and with a hand on either knee peered down at him in the gloom.

“Young feller,” he said, with much emotion, “there’s just one thing I want you to do for me when we get back to Frisco. Do you know what that is?”

“What?” asked Harry, wholly dazed and half drowned, replying mechanically.

“I want you to take all the money I get this trip and go and bet it on something for me. A man that can win out the way you’ve just done couldn’t lose at any game. Great jumping Jehoshaphat! what have you got here?”

“Is she all right?” asked Harry, struggling to his feet. He was still dazed, and had forgotten all the events of the last two months. It seemed to him that it was Griggs speaking, and that he had just pulled him and Maisie out of the Fore River.

The boatswain took the limp white figure from his arms and looked at it. It was a great white bird, quite dead, no doubt killed by its crash against the mizzenmast.

“Go below, my boy,” he said; “and get something hot and turn in. You’ve had trouble enough for one night.”

The great boatswain went forward, holding the bird in one hand and now and then slapping his great leg with the other, and letting forth a roar of amazed laughter.

“A goose,” he said; “a Yukon goose! Went overboard and came back and brought a Yukon goose! Well, the young feller is a seven-time winner. Bet ye we’ll raise whales this trip, all right.” He went forward to the galley, where he left his game, and then went back on watch.

As light grew through the chaos of struggling mist, the cry of “Land ho!” rang out from the lookout, and the ship rounded to so near dark cliffs that stretched upward into the mists out of sight that she was fairly in the wash of the great waves that thundered at their base. A moment after, ice barred their farther way on the other tack, and a great floe moved majestically along, bearing them down toward the cliffs. To lie to was to be carried in and crushed between ice and rocks, and Captain Nickerson, who was on deck, wisely guessing that it must be one of the Diomedes, wore ship and ran before the gale, coasting within sight of the great rock barrier. A half hour afterward he rounded to and swung close up under the lee of the towering northeast cliff of the big Diomede; so close to its sheer lift that one could almost throw a line ashore.

Here was level water indeed, and they were safe from the northward driven ice-floes, which would split on the island’s prow and sail by to port and starboard; but they did not escape the wind, which came over the heights in tremendous “willie-waus,” blowing, as the sailors say, “up and down like the Irishman’s hurricane.” This seems to be a peculiarity of the Arctic gale. It comes tearing over the great heights, plunges down the steep face of the cliffs, and striking the water at their base with tremendous velocity, sends it whirling out to sea in great masses of spoondrift that sail along the surface as blown snow does in winter.

Two days more the ship lay head to the cliff, swinging to two anchors, then the mists blew away, the wind went down rapidly, and the sun shone brightly on lofty granite heights. Halfway up was a little space of level ground like a shelf set in a corner of rock, and out of holes in this green level came stubby fur-clad men and women, who swarmed down the cliff by paths of their own and launched umiaks from a sheltered little hidden cove, putting out to the ship.

HOME OF “THE LITTLE MEN” OFF THE DIOMEDES

Harry was none the worse for his sudden plunge overboard a few days before. Instead of the weakness and lassitude which had followed his April upset in the Fore River, there came an immediate reaction, and he declared a few hours afterward that it had done him good; he would do it every day, if he could be sure of getting back to the ship so handily. The Arctic air was already working wonders in him. The experienced seamen shook their heads at this. They knew well that his chance had been one in a thousand, and Captain Nickerson rated him soundly for being so careless as to let a sea catch him that way.

The little men had much walrus ivory, but not much else that was of value to the ship, and their trading did not last long. They did have many curios, and Harry had an opportunity to buy some of these with the “trade goods” he had brought from Seattle for the purpose. By Captain Nickerson’s advice he had laid in a few dollars’ worth of rubber balls, huge beads, little mirrors, harmonicas, and trinkets, and he now found these very useful. He bought with them many walrus teeth; the back teeth, which are as large as one’s thumb, carved in grotesque but life-like shape of seals, bear, walrus, and other animals. Two bargains which he made are noteworthy as showing the ways of the little people in trading. One of these was for an exquisite pair of little shoes, soled with walrus hide crimped up into miniature boots, topped with the softest of fur from the reindeer fawn, and with a bright edging of scarlet cloth. They were most skillfully fashioned, and tasteful, for the Eskimo is a born artist, and were brought aboard by a young woman who apparently was very proud of them, and wished rather to exhibit than to sell them.

Harry, proud of his newly acquired Eskimo, asked her immediately, “Soonoo pechuckta?” (How much do you want?) but she replied by shaking her head and putting the shoes away in her fur gown.

By and by she brought them out again and patted them lovingly. Again Harry tried to get her to name a price for them, and after much labor he got from her the single word “Oolik” (Blanket).

“Soonoo?” asked Harry again.

“Tellumuk,” was the answer, further emphasized by holding up five fingers.

Five blankets was so obviously exorbitant a price that Harry could not and would not think of giving it, so he thought to tempt his adversary with the offer of other things. In vain he brought out tin trumpets, harmonicas, bangles, beads, and even two alarm clocks, which he had found elsewhere to be greatly desired by the tribes, and offered them singly and in groups; the owner of the little shoes was determined. To all his offers she replied with fine scorn, “Peluck” (No good), and clung persistently to her first price.

But Harry, grown wise, took a leaf from her own book. He bethought him of a little plate-glass mirror, rimmed with scarlet plush, which he had not offered thus far. It had cost him a dollar and a half at Seattle, but he was willing to trade it for the shoes. Yet he was convinced that direct offer would be useless. So he brought it on deck, and without looking at the obdurate young woman began admiring his own countenance in it. When she took a furtive interest in it, he thrust it back in his own pocket. After a little he took it out again, and once more contemplated himself in its depths. This ludicrous performance continued for some time, and he could not tell whether or not his adversary were much interested, so cleverly did she veil her thoughts. By and by her boatload of people were ready to go home, and getting into the umiak, called to her to come with them. Harry saw that she lingered, and he played his last card.

“Ah de gar!” he exclaimed; “ah de gar!” (Wonderful! wonderful!) and held the mirror in front of the little woman. She saw her own comely countenance in it, she saw the beveled glass and the vivid scarlet plush, and as Harry held out his other hand she gave a twitch of her shoulders, snatched the shoes from their concealment in her gown, and gave them to him. At the same time she caught up the mirror, flounced down into the umiak, and settled herself on the bottom, with an air that was ludicrously like that of her civilized sister when angry with herself for being outwitted. Vanity and curiosity had conquered, but it was the only case in all his dealings with Eskimos in which Harry ever knew one of them to name a price for an article and then accept something different.

The other trade, if trade it could be called, was a different matter. It was with the smallest of the Eskimo men of another boat. He had half a dozen ivory finger rings, carved symmetrically with a seal’s head, or two or three, where stones would be. Harry sighted these and wished to trade for the bunch, but this did not suit the little man at all. Instead, with much pomp and much show of valuing it highly, he took one ring from the string and offered it to Harry, saying:—

“Tobac, tobac, tunpanna kowkow” (Eating tobacco).

The Eskimos are not great smokers, a whiff or two is generally enough for them, but they are very fond of chewing tobacco, or “eating tobacco” as they call it, and there was a good store of this on the ship. Harry offered a moderate-sized piece for the ring and then wanted to purchase the second with a similar piece. This he could not do. The crafty little man’s price had risen fivefold, and it was only reluctantly that he parted with the second ring at the price of five pieces of tobacco. But when it came to the third one, there seemed to be no such thing as purchasing it. Harry offered tobacco galore, added trinkets and trade goods, but the little man was obdurate and all chances of trade seemed off.

Harry remembered the shoes and the mirror, and did not despair. He went down to his locker and brought out the alarm clock again. He wound it up, set the alarm for a little ahead of the moment, and took it on deck. There he set it up on a cask and waited. Several of the Eskimos gathered round and admired it, but the little man only looked at it out of the corner of his eye.

After a few minutes the alarm went off, and being a vigorous one, it startled the crowd of little men and women around it. They nearly fell over one another in astonishment, and when Harry wound up the alarm and set it off again, their delight was great. The ring-maker tried to assume an air of indifference, but when his boat was ready to go he came toward Harry as if to offer to trade. Harry had learned much of the ways of the Eskimo trader by that time and turned away indifferently. When the boat was loaded, he strolled to the side with the clock in his hand. The little man held up one ring, but he shook his head. Then the Eskimo offered two. The boat was just going, and Harry wanted the rings so much that he yielded. It would make four in all, which was perhaps all he cared for anyway. He handed the clock to the little man, and that worthy dropped something in his palm as he did so. At the same time he pointed toward the cliff and jabbered something excitedly in Eskimo.

Harry looked where he pointed but saw nothing. The boat was several lengths away now, the click of the windlass pawl showed that the Bowhead’s anchor was coming up, and they were off. The little man was no longer gesticulating, but looked back over his shoulder and solemnly winked one eye. This was a new feature in Eskimo expression, and Harry wondered much if a wink meant as much with these seemingly stolid people as with us. As he mused, the umiak rounded the cliff and was gone, and Harry looked at his two rings for the first time. They were not rings at all, only two circular sections of a walrus back tooth, flat and useless disks, which the little man may have meant to make into rings later.

Then he realized that a wink is a wink the world over, and the language of signs is common to all people.

The day was bright, the gale was over, and the Bowhead put to sea, once more heading northward into the mysterious Arctic, keeping a keen lookout for whales. The southerly weather had driven the ice of the straits far to the northward, and though there was now and then a floating cake, the pack was many miles distant.

“Suppose you could pull a whaleboat oar?” asked Captain Nickerson of Harry that day at dinner.

“Why, yes, sir,” replied Harry, “I think so. I’m a good oarsman, though I have never used quite such large oars as you have in the whaleboats.”

“I’m sure he could, father,” said Joe; “what of it?”

“Why, this,” replied his father; “you’ve been practically second mate of the Bowhead ever since we left Hawaii. Now I think I shall let you take a second mate’s place in charge of one of the boats, and am planning to have Harry pull an oar in your boat.”

Both boys turned red with delight at this prospect, and it was soon decided to thus promote them to the list of regular whalemen. Billy, an experienced Kanaka harpooner, was assigned to their boat as being a level-headed, skillful whaleman, whose counsel would be of use to Joe, and the whole thing was arranged.

If the two boys had been anxious to sight whales before, they were doubly eager now, and both spent as much time as they could in the rigging on the lookout. It was Joe who first of the two boys sighted a bowhead. The cry of “A-h-h blow!” had rung from the crow’s nest, and the Kanaka on the watch there reported a whale nearly dead ahead. All hands were on the lookout for the spout of this one, for the Kanakas in many cases have wonderful eyesight and can sight a whale much farther than the average white man, when, several points off the windward bow, Joe saw another blow and loudly proclaimed it from the mizzen rigging. A few moments afterward a third and a fourth were sighted, and the ship approached a school of black monsters numbering a dozen or so. Then she rounded to, a little to the windward, and the boats were hastily lowered. Harry found himself at the end of a sixteen-foot sweep that was very different from the oars he had been used to, but he soon accustomed himself to the stroke and swung along in good time with the others. He was conscious of a feeling of great elation, the thrill of ecstasy of the huntsman mingled with the dread of the unknown. They seemed such puny creatures to be attacking the greatest monster in the world. As they went on, both these feelings increased, till he shook with excitement and the man behind him noticed it. He was a brawny, grizzly old timer, bronzed by all the winds of the world, and hardened by many a hundred conflicts with the whales of all seas.

“Don’t get gallied, younker,” he said kindly; “the bowhead ain’t no whale. He’s jest a hundred tons or so of blubber and bone. If we was goin’ up against a sperm now, or a fightin’ bull humpback, ye might feel skeery, but a bowhead ain’t nothin’. They kill as easy as a slaughter-house lamb.”

Just then Harry fairly jumped from his seat, and lost his stroke for a moment. A shout had sounded, and glancing over his shoulder he saw that the first mate’s boat near by had already made fast, but had not as yet used the bomb gun. Instead, the whale seemed to have sounded too quickly, then changed his mind, and as Harry looked up over his shoulder he saw a great black mass rise fairly under the attacking boat, lifting it clear of the water, where it hung high for a moment, then, by some miracle still uncapsized, slid from the broad mass as if being launched. Even as the boat left the mountainous back, the mate leveled the bomb gun and discharged it full into the whale’s side. There was a shiver, the great flukes curled in one sweep that sent tons of spray into the air, which Mr. Jones with a skillful sweep of the steering oar narrowly avoided, and then the great black mass floated quivering on the surface.

“I told ye so, younker,” said the veteran, still swinging steadily and strongly to his oar. “He’s a dead un. There ain’t no fight in a bowhead. Ef that had been a sperm bull, there wouldn’t have been enough of that boat left to swear by. Oh, this ain’t whalin’, this ain’t; it’s pickin’ up blubber.”

Joe, standing by the steering oar, lifted his hand in a gesture commanding silence. His eyes glowered big beneath his cap, and Harry knew that they were close on to their game. A few more strokes and then, “Way enough,” said Joe gently. They glided silently forward with lifted oars. It seemed to Harry as if something took him by the throat and stopped his breathing. He would have given much to look around, but something held him motionless. He heard the stirring forward as the Kanaka harpooner moved to his position in the very bow. Then there was a gentle jolt and a “Huh!” from the harpooner as he drove the iron home.

“Give it to him!” yelled Joe; “stern all!”

Harry backed water mechanically, feeling curiously numb all over. He heard the report of the gun, and saw something tremendous and black beat the water three times with great blows within a few feet of the blade of his oar. A rush of foam shot from these blows and seemed to overwhelm him in a smother of salt water. Then he found himself still sitting on the thwart, wet to the skin and up to his knees in water, but still, to his great astonishment, alive and right side up, and backing water with mechanical precision. There was no sound save the whir of the line through the chock and the voice of the veteran in his ear.