It was in the Hope, under the command of the well-known whaler, John Gray, that I paid a seven months’ visit to the Arctic Seas in the year 1880. I went in the capacity of surgeon, but as I was only twenty years of age when I started, and as my knowledge of medicine was that of an average third year’s student, I have often thought that it was as well that there was no very serious call upon my services.
It came about in this way. One raw afternoon in Edinburgh, whilst I was sitting reading hard for one of those examinations which blight the life of a medical student, there entered to me one Currie, a fellow-student with whom I had some slight acquaintance. The monstrous question which he asked drove all thought of my studies out of my head.
“Would you care,” said he, “to start next week for a whaling cruise? You’ll be surgeon, two pound ten a month and three shillings a ton oil money.”
“How do you know I’ll get the berth?” was my natural question.
“Because I have it myself. I find at this last moment that I can’t go, and I want to get a man to take my place.”
“How about an Arctic kit?”
“You can have mine.”
In an instant the thing was settled, and within a few minutes the current of my life had been deflected into a new channel.
In little more than a week I was in Peterhead, and busily engaged, with the help of the steward, in packing away my scanty belongings in the locker beneath my bunk on the good ship Hope.
I speedily found that the chief duty of the surgeon was to be the companion of the captain, who is cut off by the etiquette of the trade from anything but very brief and technical talks with his other officers. I should have found it intolerable if the captain had been a bad fellow, but John Gray of the Hope was a really splendid man, a grand seaman and a serious-minded Scot, so that he and I formed a comradeship which was never marred during our long tête-à-tête. I see him now, his ruddy face, his grizzled hair and beard, his very light blue eyes always looking into far spaces, and his erect muscular figure. Taciturn, sardonic, stern on occasion, but always a good just man at bottom.