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Updated: June 27, 2025
He was a native of the north coast of Russia; a far away point where white men's boats never come. One whaleship had, however, been carried there by the ice-floes. After trading for the natives' furs and ivory, and having found an open channel of water to the east, the captain had kidnaped him and carried him from his home. He had been made the captain's slave.
On approaching, we were enabled to observe contorted masses and steep cliffs on the north side, which became less rugged as they neared the coast, at whose edge lay enormous ice-floes, heaped together in formidable confusion; these, before two months should have expired, would be drifted towards the temperate waters.
To be sure, the first bang of the ice-floes against the prow of these rickety boats knocked them into kindling-wood. Two-thirds of the Cossack voyagers were lost every year; and often all news that came of the crew was a mast pole washed in by the tide with a dead man lashed to the crosstrees. Small store of fresh water could be carried.
The dark water eddied and gurgled amid the ice-floes, from which a ghastly gleam was reflected, like that from the face of a corpse dimly seen amid the dark. Occasionally a huge fragment of ice would grate, and crash, and crunch against the frail ribs of the boat, as if eager to crush it and frustrate the generous purpose of its passengers.
The channel was full of ice-floes, either stranded or driven about by the currents. A thick fog came down on us, with zenithal aurora borealis, the electric action of which threw out every compass, standard and otherwise, on board. No seeing, no steering!
Up, brothers, up, let us try to save the child. Let not the fidelity and bravery of a dog put us to shame." Notwithstanding the threatening danger of being crushed to death by the rushing ice-floes, the men launched a boat and jumped into it. They reached the cradle and discovered the child in it. They placed cradle and babe in their boat and brought them safely to land.
And a brief consideration of southern conditions will show which of these types is more serviceable for Antarctic exploration, because it is obvious that the exploring ship must first of all be prepared to navigate the most stormy seas in the world, and then be ready to force her way through the ice-floes to the mysteries beyond.
With the anchor secure, walrus-hunting commenced afresh, and on the ice-floes between Hakluyt and Northumberland Islands thirty more walrus were secured. On August 16, the Roosevelt steamed back to Karnah, and the Esquimo people who intended living there for the following winter were landed.
But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the clear whale oil for illuminating purposes, the tough and supple whalebone, the spermaceti which filled the great case in the sperm-whale's head, the precious ambergris prized even among the early Hebrews, and chronicled in the Scriptures as a thing of great price were prizes, in pursuit of which men braved every terror of the deep, threaded the ice-floes of the Arctic, fought against the currents about Cape Horn, and steered to every corner of the Seven Seas the small, stout brigs and barks of New England make.
In the Box, forty feet of water struck the canyon walls and ice-floes were hurled like torpedoes against the granite spurs: the Crawling Stone was starting after its own.
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