PERILS OF THE ARCTIC

Grey River Argus, 29 May 1925, Page 5

PERILS OF THE ARCTIC

ASTONISHING ADVENTURES. VOYAGES ON THE ICE. Somewhere in the great Arctic Bay named after him lie the bones of Henry Hudson and the. little son whom his •mutinous senmen sent adrift to die 314 years ago. A trapper has .just been cruising, perhaps over Hudson’3 very bones, on a craft’ of death, yet has returned alive. He is a fur trapper of the Hudson’s Bay Company, working from the Fort Nelson depot, and while visiting his traps he was made prisoner by the ice. A tract of ice, three-quarters of a mile long and half a mile wide, became detached from the shore and went afloat with the trapper on it. All that day and all the night he was borne steadily out to sea, foodless, with 64 degrees of frost converting his feet to ice, and with his blood almost congealed; yet such is the marvel of the human constitution that the man lived to see his prison turn about and make for home. Wind and tide bore him back to the place from which he hal started, and ho was rescued, in 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 element. It carried this man nearly to death and then brought him back to life, and it once played such a trick on the late Sir Ernest Shackleton. After Ms thrilling voyage from Elephant Island to South Georgia, the great explorer saw the rudder of his boat earned away just ns land was being made. That seemed to doom him and

his party, for they must sail again for safety. The rudder went out to sea, and then the bay in which Shackleton had landed filled with ice, so that the very cave in which the party crouched was blocked up with it. ON THE ICE FOR 193 DAYS. Three days passed, and a sudden swelling tide swept the bay clear of ice. Then, says Shackleton, a strange thing happened. “The rudder, with all the 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 what a miraculous chance restored it to them. Experience shows that happy things of this sort do happen, though fame hearts 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. The 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 i-r.ve 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 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’ trip, and left his task to incompetent hands.

LONG VOYAGE ON THE FLOE. One afternoon in 1872 the ship was nipped in the ice in North Greenland waters. The new captain cried in his panic, “Throw everything on to the ice,” and out wnt food and gear and bundles, men and women following. Then the ice parted; the ship was driven in one direction by the wind, the ice floe went another way, carried by the current. On the ice there were 19 adults, including two Eskimo women; and in one of the bundles was found a baby, Charlie Polaris, born on the ship during the 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 lived on it for 193 days. The current bore them away and away from the Old World to the Now, 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- d’Ogs, and 6301 b of pemmican. On that, they lived, while the sea carried them on and on to they knew not what destination.