ARCTIC PERILS

Greymouth Evening Star, 16 May 1925, Page 2

ARCTIC PERILS

A. tbbribm; jowbsew

Somewhere in t’he great Arctic bay.. named after him-'.-lie- th ebones of Henry Hudson and-tiro little son whom his mutinous seamelr sent adrift to die 314 years ago.- A trapper has jtist been cruiSiilg, perhaps; over Hudson’s very bOnesj on a- craft of death,- yet has returned alive. He is a fur trapped of the Hudson’s Bay Company, working from the Fort Nelson depot, and wh-.e visiting his traps he was made prisoner by thb ice. , . A- tract office, o’: a (•'ile long; and half a mile wide, becamfe detached from the shore, and went afloat with the trapper on it. All that day and all the night ho was borne steadily out to- sea, foodless, with 64 degrees of frost converting his feet to ice, and with his blood almost con-gealed;-yet such is the marvel of the hitmaii constitution; tliat tits mall' lived to she his pi'isoii tiltn about diiil hiakd for home. Wind aiid tide b'orb' liiiii back to' the place from which he had started, and he was rescued, is a.terrible plight, but alive; and was doing well when the message telling the world of his misadventure was despatched. , . Truly the sea is a capricious elejlfient. It carried this man nearly to death and then brought him back to life, aiid it once played such a trick on the late Sir- Ernest Shackleton. After his thrilling voyage from Elephant Island to South Georgia; the great exulorer saw the ruddet 6f his boat carried away jiis't as laild was being made.- That seemed to dobfii liiiii find his party; for thby must sail again fob sarety.- The riidd-er wCnt out to sea; and-theii ths bay ill which' Shabliletoil Had landed filled with ice, so that the very Cave in which the party crouched was blocked up' with it. -■ _ Jhree days passed, and a sudden swelling tide swept the bay clear of ice; Then, says Shackleton, a strange thing happened. “The rudder, with' alt 9 tile broad Atlantic to sail in and the coasts of two continents to search for a resting place, came bobbing back into our cove.” They got it again and could steer their boat afresh to safer anchorage. But wliaf a miraculous chance restored it to them. Experience shows that happy things of ’this sort do happen, faint liearts would never count on them. At Bjorko, in Finland, a few years ago, 300 fishermen, with 80 horses to. carry their nets and tackle, were fishing through ice holes on the coast. Hie ice broke and bore them all, men and horses, away. For six hours they sailed out to sea, but in another six hours sailed back, none of them the worse save for frost and terror. Perhaps the greatest wonder of the kind, however, dates back to 1872, to the Arctic expedition of the Polaris, under the command of an extraordinary 1 man, an American blacksmith named Charles Francis Hall, who had never seen the sea until he set forth upon it as an explorer. He did wonders, but died during the Polaris’s trip, and left his task to incompetent hands.

One afternoon in 1872, the ship was nipped in the ico in North Greenland waters. The new captain cried in his panic, “Throw everything on to the ice,’’ and out went food and gear and bundles, men and women following. Then the ice parted; the ship was driven in one directin by the wind, the ice floe went another way, carried by the current. On the ice there were. 19 adults, including two Eskimo woiiien ; and in one of the bundles was foufid a baby, Charlie Polaris, boin on l he .ship during (he trip. He had been slung overboard in the panic with the goods. There they all were on a floe a mile wide, which might be crushed at any moment; yet they all lived on it foi 193-days. The current bore them away and away from the Old "World to the New, and finally the floating home was reduced to a patch 100 yards long by 70 yards in breadth. Yet the people survived. They had at the start 11 bags of bread, 14 small hams, some cans of meat and soup, a little chocolate, a- few dogs, and 630 pouhids of peinmican. On that they lived, while the sea carried them on and on to they knew not what destination. ;.