Chapter XXIV

THE port of Pröven is securely sheltered by its monster hills. But they can not be said to smile a welcome upon the navigator. A smiling country, like a smiling face, needs some provision of fleshly integuments; and no earthly covering masks the grinning rocks of Pröven. They look as if the process of crumbling, and wrinkling, and splitting, and splintering had been at work on them since the first Arctic frost succeeded the last metamorphic fire; and even now great ledges are wedged off from the hillsides by the ice, and roll clattering down the slopes into the very midst of the settlement.

Summer comes slowly upon Pröven. When we arrived, the slopes of the hills were heavily patched with snow, and the surface, where it showed itself, was frozen dry. The water-line was toothed with fangs of broken ice, which scraped against the beach as the tides rose and fell; and an iceberg somehow or other had found its way into the little port. It was a harmless lump, too deep sunk to float into dangerous nearness; and its spire rose pleasantly, like a village church.

"_July_ 3. I am writing in the 'Hosky' House of Cristiansen. Cristiansen is the Danish governor of Pröven, and this house of Cristiansen is _the House_ of Pröven. Its owner is a simple and shrewd old Dane, hale and vigorous, thirty-one of whose sixty-four winters have been spent within the Arctic circle, north of 70° N. Lord in his lonely region--his four sons and five subordinates, oilmen, the only white faces about him, except when he visits Uppernavik--the good old man has the satisfaction of knowing no superior. His habits are three fourths Esquimaux, one-eighth Danish, and the remainder Prövenish, or peculiarly his own. His wife is a half-breed, and his family, in language and aspect, completely Esquimaux.

"When the long, dark winter comes, he exchanges books with his friend the priest of Uppernavik. 'The Dantz Penning Magazin,' and 'The History of the Unitas Fratrum,' take the place of certain well-thumbed, ancient, sentimental novels; and sometimes the priest comes in person to tenant the 'spare room,' which makes it very pleasant, 'for we talk Danish.'

"Except this spare room, which elsewhere would be called the loft of the house, its only apartment is the one in which I am. And here eat, and drink, and cook, and sleep, and live, not only Cristiansen and all his descendants, but his wife's mother, and her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who are growing up about her. It is fifteen feet broad by sixteen long, with just height enough for a grenadier, without his cap, to stand erect, and not touch the beams. The frame of the house is of Norway pine coated with tar, with its interspaces caulked with moss and small window-panes inserted in a deep casing of wood.

"The most striking decorative feature is a ledge or shelf of pine plank, of varying width, which runs round three of its sides. Its capacity is wonderful. It is the sofa and bed, on which the entire united family find room to loll and sleep; and upon it now are huddled, besides a navy doctor and his writing board, one ink bottle, sundry articles of food and refreshment, one sleeping child, one lot of babies not in the least asleep, one canary-bird cage with its exotic and most sorrowful little prisoner, and an infinite variety of other articles too tedious to mention, comprising seal-skins, boots, bottles, jumpers, glasses, crockery both of kitchen and nursery, coffee-pots, dog-skin socks, canvas pillows, an eider-down comforter, and a sick bitch with a youthful family of whining puppies.

"Una, the second daughter, has been sick and under treatment; and she is now hard at work with her sisters, Anna, Sara, and Cristina, on a tribute of gratitude to her doctor. They have been busy all the morning whipping and stitching the seal-skins with reindeer tendon thread. My present is to be a complete suit of ladies' apparel, made of the richest seal-skin, according to the standard mode of Pröven, which may always be presumed to be the 'latest winter fashion.' It is a really elegant dress. To some the unmentionables might savor of mascularity; but having seen something of a more polite society, my feminine associations are not restricted to petticoats. Extremes meet in the Esquimaux of Greenland and Amazons of Paris.

"The large family is a happy one: so small a home could not tolerate a quarrelsome mess. The sons, the men Cristiansens, brave and stalwart fellows, practiced in the kayack, and the sledge, and the whale-net, adroit with the harpoon and expert with the rifle, are constant at the chase, and bring home their spoil, with the honest pride becoming good providers of their household. And the women, in their nursing, cooking, tailoring, and housekeeping, are, I suppose, faithful enough. But what favorable impression that the mind gets through other channels can contend against the information of the nose! Organ of the aristocracy, critic and _magister morum_ of all civilization, censor that heeds neither argument nor remonstrance--the nose, alas! it bids me record, that to all their possible godliness cleanliness is not superadded.

"During the short summer of daylight--it is one of the many apparent vestiges, among this people, of ancient nomadic habits--the whole family gather joyously in the summer's lodge, a tent of seal or reindeer skin, pitched out of doors. Then the room has its annual ventilation, and its cooking and chamber furniture are less liable to be confounded. For the winter the arrangement is this: on three sides of the room, close by the ledge I have spoken of, stand as many large pans of porous steatite or serpentine, elevated on slight wooden tripods. These, filled with seal-blubber, and garnished with moss round the edge to serve as a wick, unite the functions of chandelier and stove. They who quarrel with an ill-trimmed lamp at home should be disciplined by one of them. Each boils its half-gallon kettle of coffee in twenty minutes, and smokes--like a small chimney on fire; and the three burn together. There is no flue, or fire-place, or opening of escape.

"On the remaining side of the room stand a valued table and three chairs; and with these, like a buhl cabinet or fancy étagère, conspicuous in its modest corner, a tub. It is the steeping-tub for curing skins. Its contents require active fermentation to fit them for their office; and, to judge from the odor, the process had been going on successfully."

We warped out to sea again on the afternoon of the third, with our friend the cooper for pilot; the entire settlement turning out upon the rocks to wish us good-by, and remaining there till they looked in the distance like a herd of seal. But we found no opening in the pack, and came back again to Pröven on the fourth, not sorry, as the weather was thickening, to pass our festival inside the little port.

Our celebration was of the primitive order. We saluted the town with one of the largest balanced stones, which we rolled down from the cliff above; and made an egg-nogg of eider eggs; and the men had a Hosky ball; and, in a word, we all did our best to make the day differ from other days--which attempt failed. Still, God ever bless the fourth!

The sixth was Sunday, and we attended church in the morning at the schoolmaster's. The service consisted of a long-winded hymn, and a longer winded sermon, in the Esquimaux--surely the longest of long-winded languages. The congregation were some two dozen men and women, not counting our party.

We put to sea in the afternoon. The weather was soft and warm on shore; but outside it was perfectly delightful: no wind--the streams of ice beyond enforcing a most perfect calm upon the water; the thermometer in the sunshine frequently as high as 76°, and never sinking below 30° in the shade. I basked on deck all night, sleeping in the sun.

And such a night! I saw the moon at midnight, while the sun was slanting along the tinted horizon, and duplicated by reflection from the water below it: the dark bergs to seaward had outlines of silver; and two wild cataracts on the shore-side were falling from ice-backed cliffs twelve hundred feet into the sea.

_July_ 7. I was awakened from my dreamy sleep to receive the visits of a couple of boats that were working slowly to us through the floes. An English face--two English faces--twelve English faces: what a happy sight! We had had no one but ourselves to speak our own tongue to for three hundred days, and were as glad to listen to it as if we had been serving out the time in the penitentiary of silence at Auburn or Sing-Sing. Their broad North Briton was music. It was not the offensive dialect of the provincial Englishman, with the affectation of speaking his language correctly; but a strong and manly home-brew of the best language in the world for words of sincere and hearty good-will. They had to turn up their noses at our seal's-liver breakfast; but, when they heard of our winter trials, they stuffed down the seal without tasting it. I felt sorry after they were off, that I had not taken their names down every one.

The whaling vessels to which they returned were in the freer water outside the shore stream, the _Jane O'Boness_, Captain John Walker; and the _Pacific_, Captain Patterson. These gentlemen boarded us as soon as we got through the ice to them. They thought our escape miraculous; and it was some time before they found words to congratulate us. "Augh!" and "Wonderful!" with a peculiar interchange of looks, was all they said.

These burned children dread the fire; and their conversation opened our eyes to dangers we had gone through half unconsciously. Few masters in the whaling trade but have at some time suffered wreck. Two seasons ago, this veteran Patterson saw his ship thrust bodily through another, and then the transfixed and transfixing vessels were both eaten up together by the greedy floes. He stepped from the last remnant of his buried sail on to the hummocks: "And that's a' that e'e ha' seen o' her!"

They left us newspapers, potatoes, turnips, eggs, and fresh beef enough to eat out every taint of scurvy! They took letters from us for home, and cheered ship when we parted. I must not soon forget the Pacific and _Jane O'Boness_.

(_Editor's note._) The next day they made Uppernavik. July and a good part of August were spent in a vain endeavor to return to Lancaster Sound and complete their explorations in Wellington Channel; but the ships were so beset with floes and icebergs that this project had to be abandoned. On August 21st the expedition headed homeward, and it arrived in New York on September 30, 1851.

THE END

* * * * *

OUTING ADVENTURE LIBRARY

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¶ Here are brought together for the first time the great stories of adventure of all ages and countries. These are the personal records of the men who climbed the mountains and penetrated the jungles; who explored the seas and crossed the deserts; who knew the chances and took them, and lived to write their own tales of hardship and endurance and achievement. The series will consist of an indeterminate number of volumes--for the stories are myriad. The whole will be edited by Horace Kephart. Each volume answers the test of these two questions: Is it true? Is it interesting?

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1. IN THE OLD WEST, by George Frederick Ruxton. The men who blazed the trail across the Rockies to the Pacific were the independent trappers and hunters in the days before the Mexican war. They left no records of their adventures and most of them linger now only as shadowy names. But a young Englishman lived among them for a time, saw life from their point of view, trapped with them and fought with them against the Indians. That was George Frederick Ruxton. His story is our only complete picture of the Old West in the days of the real Pioneers, of Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Bill Williams, the Sublettes, and all the rest of that glorious company of the forgotten who opened the West.

2. CASTAWAYS AND CRUSOES. Since the beginnings of navigation men have faced the dangers of shipwreck and starvation. Scattered through the annals of the sea are the stories of those to whom disaster came and the personal records of the way they met it. Some of them are given in this volume, narratives of men who lived by their hands among savages and on forlorn coasts, or drifted helpless in open boats. They range from the South Seas to the Gulf of St. Lawrence, from the iron coast of Patagonia to the shores of Cuba, They are echoes from the days when the best that could be hoped by the man who went to sea was hardship and man's-sized work.

3. CAPTIVES AMONG THE INDIANS. First of all is the story of Captain James Smith, who was captured by the Delawares at the time of Braddock's defeat, was adopted into the tribe, and for four years lived as an Indian, hunting with them, studying their habits, and learning their point of view. Then there is the story of Father Bressani who felt the tortures of the Iroquois, of Mary Rowlandson who was among the human spoils of King Philip's war, and of Mercy Harbison who suffered in the red flood that followed St. Clair's defeat. All are personal records made by the actors themselves in those days when the Indian was constantly at our forefathers's doors.

4. FIRST THROUGH THE GRAND CANYON, by Major John Wesley Powell. Major Powell was an officer in the Union Army who lost an arm at Shiloh. In spite of this four years after the war he organized an expedition which explored the Grand Canyon of the Colorado in boats--the first to make this journey. His story has been lost for years in the oblivion of a scientific report. It is here rescued and presented as a record of one of the great personal exploring feats, fitted to rank with the exploits of Pike, Lewis and Clark, and Mackenzie.

5. ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE-PACK, By Elisha Kent Kane, M. D. Out of the many expeditions that went north in search of Sir John Franklin over fifty years ago, it fell to the lot of one, financed by a New York merchant, to spend an Arctic winter drifting aimlessly in the grip of the Polar ice in Lancaster Sound. The surgeon of the expedition kept a careful diary and out of that record told the first complete story of a Far Northern winter. That story is here presented, shorn of the purely scientific data and stripped to the personal exploits and adventures of the author and the other members of the crew.

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Transcriber's Note

Standardization of hyphenated words was employed. Illustrations were moved to rejoin paragraphs split by them. Although the original printed version used un-italicized drop caps for month names beginning the chapter text, the whole month's name was converted to italics here.

End of Project Gutenberg's Adrift in the Arctic Ice Pack, by Elisha Kent Kane