PERILS OF THE ARCTIC.

King Country Chronicle, Volume XX, Issue 2119, 26 May 1925, Page 6

PERILS OF THE ARCTIC.

ASTONISHING ADVENTURES

VOYAGES ON THE ICE

Soewhere in the great. Arctic bay named after him lie the bones of Henry Hudson and the little son whom his mutinous seamen sent adrift to die 314 years ago. A trapper lfas just been cruising perhaps over Hudson’s very bones, on a craft of death, yet has returned alive. He is a fur trapper of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and while visiting his traps he was and while visiting hs traps he was made prisoner by the ice. A tract of ice, three-quarters of a mile long and half a mile wide, became detaphed 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; yetb 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 had started, and he was rescued, in a terrible plight but alive; and was doing well when the message telling the world of his misadventure was dispatched. 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 sufch a trick on 'the late Sir Ernest Shackleton. After his thrilling voyago from Elephant Island to South Georgia, the great explorer saw the rudder of his boat carried away just as land was being made. That seemed to doom him and bis party, for they must sail again for safety. The rudder went out to sea, and the bay in which Shackleton had landed filled with ice, so that the very cave in which the party cro(udied was blocked up with it.

ON THE ICE FOB 193 DAYS. Throe days passed, and a. sudden swelling tide swept the bay clear of ice. Then, says Shackleton, a sitrange 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 gott iib again and could steer tlieir boat afresh to safer anchorage. But what a miraculous chance restored it to them.

Experience shows that many things of this sorb do happen, though faint 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 boles on the coast. The ice broke, and bore them all, men and horses, away. For six boars they sailed ouit to sea, but in a no'lnn' six hours sailed back, none of tin m the worse save for frost and terror.

Perhaps the greatest wonder of ’lie 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, hut died during the Polaris’s 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 went food and gear and bundles, men and women following.

Then the ice parted; the ship was driven in one direction by the wind, the ico floo 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, Charles Polaris, bom cn the ship during flic trip. Ho had been slung overboard in the panic with the goods! Them they all were on a floe a mile wide, which might be crushed at any moment, yet they all lived on it for 19.3 days. The current bore them away and away from tlio Old World to the Now, and finally tho floating homo was reduced: to a paiUdi 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 pounds of pemmican. On that they lived, while the sea carried 'then on and on to they knew not what destination.