In the Great White Land

A Tale of the Antarctic Ocean BY DR. GORDON STABLES, R.N. Author of “The Naval Cadet” “Crusoes of the Frozen North” &c. Illustrated BLACKIE & SON LIMITED LONDON AND GLASGOW

Printed in Great Britain by Blackie & Son, Limited, Glasgow

ILLUSTRATIONS

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BOOK I FAR AWAY IN THE FROZEN NORTH

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IN THE GREAT WHITE LAND

CHAPTER I DAYDAWN IN THE ARCTIC REGIONS—WERE THEY SAVAGES?

“Is it a man, or is it a young Polar bear standing on end?”

Had any one seen that strange figure, shuffling slowly to and fro on the snow-clad Polar ice on this bitterly cold morning late in winter, he might have been excused for asking himself that question.

All around was a scene of desolation such as can only be witnessed in Arctic seas at this season of the year.

Desolation? Yes; but beautiful desolation—a desolation that held one spellbound in silent, solemn admiration.

It had been a long, long night of just three months or nearly, and yesterday the sun—glad herald of the opening season—had glinted over the southern{12} horizon for one brief spell, then sunk again in golden glory.

Yesterday all hands had crowded the deck, the frozen rigging, and the tops themselves of the good barque Walrus, to welcome with cheers and song the first appearance of the god of day. And from many a hole in igloo side, in the village that clustered half hidden beneath those pearly hills, natives had crawled out, as crawleth rat from its burrow, to throw themselves on their faces, to moan, to worship, and to pray.

To-day the romance has worn off a little, and the crew of the Walrus (which a peep round the side of the one solitary iceberg that rises in the midst of this frozen bay reveals) will raise nor song nor cheer.

But the white light broadens in the southern sky, the beams of the aurora, that a little while before were flickering and dancing pink and white in the north, fade, the bright stars wax faint and beautiful, then die. A broad band of orange light low down on the horizon, with far above one crimson feather cloud—then the sun’s appearance.

Ah! We can see now that the figure is no bear, but a man, though covered with hoar frost—his skin boots, skin cap, skin coat and all, and his beard and moustache are white and hung with icicles, which tinkle as he climbs the iceberg, lifts the old quadrant, and takes his sight.

While he does so he touches a button, on a little{13} box hung to his short belt, which sets up communication with an instrument and chronometer on the ship.

The man with the beard of tinkling icicles is Captain Mayne Brace himself. Laughing with almost boyish glee as he slings his quadrant and beats his mittened, paw-like hands to woo back their circulation, he quickly descends, and begins to round in the slack of the field telegraph.

Two huge black Newfoundlands, Nora and Nick, have found their way down off the ship, and now come rushing to meet him, making the icy rocks and hills around the bay ring back their joyous barking.

There is, I believe, no light in all the wide world half so bright and dazzling as that of the first brief day of an Arctic spring. Scarce can the human eye, so long accustomed to the soft, tender star-rays, the flickering, coloured aurora, or magic moon-beams, bear to look on the white wastes all around, which seem to have been sown with billions and trillions of tiny diamonds, the God-made prisms and crystals of the virgin snow, pure and white as brow of angel.

The ship towards which Captain Mayne Brace is slowly advancing looks, but for her masts and rigging, like a white marquee, for from stem to stern she had been roofed over, many, many moons ago,{14} when first anchored here in the Gulf of Incognita high to the North, and west of Baffin’s Bay.

Snow-steps lead him aboard, and the surgeon himself meets him at the frozen gangway.

“Sick all doing well, sir,” says the doctor. “Every one been out to-day to peep at the sun, and the sight has done them all good, though it has made some of them long for the green glades and rolling woods of dear old England. But come below, captain, and thaw your beard. Dinner ready to dish up. Let me lead you. Mind that rope. Step high, and you’ll manage. There, now, catch hold of the rail, and I’ll go down the companion in front. Just fourteen steps. Make your feet your friends, and count.”

For Captain Mayne Brace was for the time being snow-blind.

At the foot of the ladder the steward helped him to get out of his ice-rig, and to thaw his beard and eyebrows, then led him in.

He looked old no longer, but brown-bearded, rosy, rubicund, and jolly—just as a sailor should be.

It was not, however, until the soup was finished—real pea-soup with some strength and body in it—that he once more regained his sight. He had shut his eyes and leaned back in his easy-chair while the steward was changing the plates, and when he looked again, he beheld the saloon table encircled with bright, youthful, and happy faces.{15}

Faces with hope in them, eyes that danced with new-born joy; for after all these months of dreary darkness, of shrieking storms and blinding blizzards, had they not seen the sun at last? Yes, and the days would lengthen and lengthen till it would be all one long, bright Arctic day. The snows would melt in the glens yonder, avalanches would fall thundering into the valleys beneath, the tides would break the ice around; yonder mountain berg, which had loomed ghost-like all through the everlasting night of winter, would move seawards and away; then a week of mist, which would lift at length, and reveal hills already patched with the yellow and red of lichens and the green of mosses, soft and tender. For summer comes quickly in the Arctic.

And what then? Why, the birds would return in their tens of thousands, the gulls and gullimots, the malleys, the pilots, the beautiful angel-snowbird, and the wee snow-bunting itself. Then it would be summer, you see. Bears themselves, that slept in frozen pits or caves for months and months, would be on the prowl once more, and eke the Arctic foxes; the sea would be alive and teeming with fish, from great sharks down to the sportive and gay little ghahkas. Whales—the gigantic “right whales”—would dash into the bay, unicorns would be seen, great seals and walruses would scramble on to patches of ice to bask in the sunshine; and, spreading white sails now{16} to woo the breeze, the Walrus barque would steam slowly away through the opening ice, all hands intent on making their fortunes, that in a “bumper ship” they might sail southwards long before the autumn winds began to blow.

Hadn’t Captain Mayne Brace told those two happy, hungry boys yonder all that would happen? And was the captain ever wrong? Not he.

“Yes, mate, I will have another slice of that brown beef,” said Charlie.

“Thank you, mate,” said Walt; “and why shouldn’t I?”

Both boys were about the same age—glorious and independent sixteen—both called the captain uncle, yet the boys were only cousins.

They loved, respected, nay, even revered, that brown-bearded skipper, as only boys that have an “uncle” who has been twenty long years on the stormy ocean can, and do.

This had been the lads’ first cruise. They were orphans, and though well educated, had been left almost penniless, and were going to adopt the sea as a profession. Their uncle had apprenticed them to the barque, and just because he liked them, they lived here in the saloon, and had a cabin all to themselves, instead of roughing it on the half-deck, sleeping in wooden bunks, and “chumming” it with the spectioneer, the carpenter, and bo’s’n.{17}

He liked the lads, I say, and no man who is over forty, and has still a soul left in him, can help liking an innocent boy of this age, ere yet the bloom has left his healthy cheeks, or the days have come when he scores twenty and fancies himself a real live man.

Walt and Charlie to-day, being so happy at heart from having seen the sun again, were raking the skipper fore and aft with concentrated broadsides of questions.

It was “Oh, I say, uncle,” this and “I say, uncle,” this, that, and t’other all the time, until the great plum-pudding was borne in, and then they stopped their chatter for a minute at least, to wonder and admire.

No ordinary “plum-duff” this. It was large, and round, and brown, and jolly, half inclined to burst its sides with merriment, as the mate lovingly poured the rich gravy over it. Inside it was studded with real raisins, like the stars of an Arctic night in number. Those raisins were well within hail of each other, and not simply dotted and dibbled in here and there as with the point of a marling-spike.

For Captain Mayne Brace knew how a boy or man should live, to buck himself up to face the rigours of an Arctic winter.

While the boys are busy striking their share of that lordly plum-pudding below, let me say just one brief word or two about the Walrus herself.{18}

She was almost a new barque then, and good enough to go anywhere and do anything, and belonged to three speculative merchants at Hull. These owners thought they knew quite a deal about Greenland East and Greenland West, and because they had never been to Polar seas, imagined that you had only to have a good ship and a crack crew to steam and sail away to the frozen North, pick up a paying cargo of seals or whales—skins and blubber—and sail back again, giving to the spirited owners a modest 200 per cent. on the capital.

The Walrus had been capitally found, her engines were the best, she was built of teak and braced with oak, fortified forward and all along the water-line, and carried every modern appliance that a barque could bear, with electric light, and—well, and what not?

Then Brace himself had been in the “country,” as the sea of ice is called, all his life, so had Milton the mate—both Dundee men—and the crew of Hull men, Scots, and Shetlanders could hardly have been better chosen.

“I’m going to do my level best,” Captain Mayne Brace had said to his owners, as they all sat together in the cosy saloon, while, hardly a year ago, the Walrus, with steam up, was just about to bear up and away. “I’ll do my best, gentlemen, to bring the Walrus home a bumper ship. I’ll try the sealing{19} first. If they have been scared away by the impulsive Danes, I’ll bear up for the Bay of Baffin and do what I can with the whales, even if I have to winter there and wait for the spring fishing.”

“Bravo, Brace!” said one of the owners. “It is all a bit of a spec on our part, you know. But we’re well insured, Brace, and rather than come home a clean ship, we wouldn’t mind if you left her ribs in Baffin’s Bay.”

Brace smiled. He knew what they meant. He had heard such hints before. But these greedy owners had made just one mistake. They had chosen as skipper an honest man—the noblest work of God.

“I’m going to do the best for us all,” he repeated quietly.

Then good-byes were said, and the ship had sailed.

Nor’wards, ever nor’wards, the Walrus had gone cracking on, under steam or under sail, leaving the green British shores on which spring was already spreading bourgeon, wild flower, and leaf. Nor’wards, and past the Orkneys, the Shetlands, and the Faroes; nor’wards, into wilder, bluer, blacker seas and shorter days, encountering storms such as cannot even be conceived by sailors in other parts of the world, with waves as high as pyramids, foam-crested, and madly, demoniacally breaking around, or against, or over the barque; nor’wards, with ice-bound bows, and snowstorms raging on the deck, and seas that sang in{20} the frosty air as they went curling past; nor’wards as defiantly as ever sailed ship from British shore.

Nor’wards, but all in vain. For the Danes, who had ploughed their way in their sturdy high-freeboard ships through the darkness of winter itself, had been there before them.

Long months’ fishing and hardly fifty tons of oil. British though they were, the daring Danes had kept ahead of them, leaving naught for them to gaze upon save blood-stained ice and gory krengs, on which gaunt bears were feeding.

Captain Mayne Brace, disgusted, had left the country, and, after a long voyage, had arrived in Baffin’s Bay.

A few “right whales” had been seen, but even they were hunted and wild, and so they had fished all the summer and caught nothing.

Well, but Captain Brace only shook his brown beard and laughed. He wasn’t the man to let down his heart in a hurry.

He was just the very life and soul of his crew; he bore all his own hardships with never a murmur, and had taught his men to do the same. All through the darkness he studied to keep them active. They had games on the snow under stars and aurora; they fished in the ice-holes, tobogganed on the one great ghostly berg that lay not far off; and, on board, hardly an evening passed but some sort of{21} amusement had been on the boards—a play, a dance, a sing-song, a yarning-and-story-telling spell, or a concert itself.

They had often gone on shore in sledges, the men drawing each other time about, and Nick and Nora lending a shoulder.

The doctor was a plucky, clever young fellow about twenty years old, who, having to wait for another whole twelve months before he should be old enough—though he had passed—to be gowned and capped, thought he might as well put in that year at sea, and so here he was.

Next to the skipper himself young Dr. Wright was the best-loved man on board. He was really the quintessence of kindness, and you never would have found him in his bunk if one of the men were seriously ill.

To-day he would not wait the conclusion of dinner, but, with his telescope strapped across his shoulder, he had scrambled right up to the crow’s-nest itself, to have one look round before the sun went down again.

At sea it is always the strange and the unexpected that is happening.

But when Wright turned his glass towards the great snow-lands of the west, he started back and rubbed his eyes.

Were those eyes deceiving him?{22}

He wiped the glass and looked again.

“Mercy on us!” he muttered. “Who or what are these?”

It was a team of some kind that had just come over the horizon, and was now wending its way adown the league-long slope towards the head of the bay.

And now he can make them out more distinctly. It was some wild and wandering tribe of semi-savages from the interior, with dogs and sledges and men on skis,[A] or snow-shoes.

He knew that these roving bands were dangerous, and that they came but to rob or even to carry off into exile the more peaceable Yaks who live along the shores.

So he went hurrying down now to make his report, and soon the news spread through the ship, and the excitement was very great indeed.

The warriors—if warriors they were—delayed their coming, however.

The sun set, darkness fell, and it seemed evident that the natives had made a détour, or gone away entirely.

But watchful eyes guarded the Walrus and the village on shore through all the dreary hours of darkness that followed.

The Yaks ashore yonder had been altogether{23} friendly to the Walrus people, and Captain Mayne Brace determined that he would defend them to the last in case of attack.

But night passed by without a single event happening; and about half-past ten, just as the dawn began to appear in the east, like the reflection from a great city, Wright went up to the crow’s-nest, and once more turned his telescope westwards.

Yes; yonder they were, sure enough, at the very head of the bay not five miles off. He could see their gesticulations, and watch the men as they went scurrying to and fro seeking for errant dogs to harness to the sledges.

They were coming! And before day dawned or the sun rose they would be all around the ship.

The best way to secure peace is to be ready for war.

But Captain Mayne Brace was soon prepared to welcome either friend or foe.

Were they savages?{24}

CHAPTER II “HEAVE ROUND, SIR,” SAID CAPTAIN MAYNE BRACE

When the Walrus, in the shortening days of autumn, had steamed slowly into Incognita Bay, she had to force her way through the pancake ice with which the whole extent of the water was covered. Flat pieces these are, probably no more than a foot thick, covered of course with several inches of snow, and with an average diameter of, say, eight feet. They are really the débris of a baby-floe which the waves, raised by some far-off gale of wind, have broken up. The snow-edge all around them is raised by the constant contact of the pieces of ice with one another, and this gives them a fancied resemblance to gigantic pancakes. Hence their name.

But soon after the Walrus had anchored, the sky had cleared, and in the dead, unbroken silence of an early winter, they were frozen together by strong bay-ice. Then snow had fallen and fallen and fallen, with never a breath of wind strong enough to lift one feathery flake, till, on looking out over the bulwarks{25} one morning after the decks had been cleared, and the sun was shining again, lo! the whole surface of the bay was one unbroken, unwrinkled sheet of dazzling snow.

Had that fall continued it would have buried ship and crew and all.

Then the glass had gone down somewhat, and the snow-field fell and shrank.

Harder frost than ever rendered Nature’s winter winding-sheet after this so solid and hard, that a regiment of artillery could have passed over it and left not a trace behind.

When snow had again fallen, it had been accompanied by such high, wild winds, that the flakes were ground into choking ice-dust, and swept clean off the surface of the bay.

The head of this inlet was about five nautical miles from the ship, but as soon as the advancing natives got on to the level snow-bay, with dogs and sledges, they commenced to make short work of this, and their strange, shrill cries, as the dogs were urged madly onwards, could now be distinctly heard by those on board the Walrus.

They were coming on like a whirlwind!

Faded the rich orange bar on the southern horizon, and the first rays of the great silver shield of a sun fell athwart the bay.

The advance was stopped in a second’s time.{26} Down dropped men and dogs, the dogs to rest and pant, the natives to pray, their heads turned sunwards.

Two figures in the tallest sledge, who were wrapped in the skins of the big ice-bear, did not descend. Yet even they bent low their heads in reverence.

“We will have no fight,” said Captain Mayne Brace. “Men who pray never fight, save in a cause that is just.”

“For all that,” said “Dr.” Wright, “look yonder!”

He was pointing northwards, where the Teelies, as the friendly natives were called, could now be seen rapidly advancing in a compact body, all armed with that terrible battle-axe, the seal-club.

They were evidently bent on intercepting the newcomers. Perhaps they knew, of old, those semi-savages from the far interior.

“Now,” said the skipper, “this affair enters on a new phase, and if we cannot intervene as peacemakers, the snow out yonder will soon be brown with blood.”

“I have it, sir,” cried bold young Wright. “Give me ten men, and I will go and meet the Teelies. I don’t want to see bloodshed, captain. I have enough on the sick-list as it is, without the addition of wounded Yaks.”

“Take your men, and off you go, Wright,” cried Mayne Brace, laughing; “but I believe you are just spoiling for a fight all the same.{27}”

Before an Englishman could have said “Auchtermuchty” without choking, Wright and his ten merry men were over the side and away.

He soon reached the Teelies and stopped, but these men seemed very excited, and brandished their clubs threateningly.

The sleigh Eskimos had also halted, and appeared to be preparing.

At that moment a battle appeared to be imminent, and, if it took place, a queer one it would be.

The Teelies were like a bull-terrier straining wildly at the end of its chain, mad to make a dash for the enemy.