CHAPTER XIV
THE SUN COMES BACK
January 25 was a day of rejoicing, because it marked the return of the sun, after seventy-one days. The sun was only rather indistinctly visible, half a disc above the ice, to the south, at noon, but from now on every day would be a little longer than the day before. It was the fourth time I had seen the sun come back in the Arctic and this time was the one which gave me the greatest satisfaction, because so much depended on our getting good daylight.
We celebrated by a little feast and some good singing in the evening. We had had a couple of cases of canned oysters on deck when the Karluk was struck and while I was waiting for the ship to go down on the eleventh I had found two tins of these oysters in the galley; the cook had brought them in to thaw them out. I threw the cases over-board on the ice where they broke and scattered tins of oysters around. We dug in the drifting snow and found this treasure trove and on this evening we had the oysters in soup and otherwise, and then had a “sing.”
It was a fine clear night outside, with little or no wind, the land visible to the southwest and the temperature between thirty and forty below zero. Gathered around the big stove in the box-house we went through a varied and impromptu programme of song and recitation. Some one recited “Casey at the Bat,” another “Lasca,” while Munro gave us poems by Burns, of which he had a goodly store in his memory. With or without the accompaniment of instrumental music on a comb, we sang about every popular favorite, old and new: “Loch Lomond” and “The Banks of the Wabash,” “The Heart Bowed Down” and “I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now,” “Sweet Afton” and “The Devil’s Ball,” “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls” and “Maggie Murphy’s Home,” “Red Wing” (the favorite), “Aileen Alana” (another favorite), “Put on Your Old Gray Bonnet,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “The Wearing of the Green,” “Jingle Bells” (which might have been appropriate if we had used the dog harness which we had with bells on it and had ridden on the sledges instead of walking) and many another song, good, bad or indifferent. The Eskimo woman sang hymns and the little girl sang nursery songs, such as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” in which her mother joined.
It may be hard to believe but we were really enjoying ourselves these days. We were comfortable in our quarters, with plenty to eat and no lack of fuel. There was work to be done and all hands kept busily at it, with no time to mope or indulge in vain regrets; sleep came easily at the end of the day’s occupations and though we did not have each man his private room and bath we had more soothing beds than I have slept on in some hotels.
Every day we progressed in our preparations to make the landward journey. On the twenty-sixth, for instance, in addition to the constant round of packing and repacking, weighing this and measuring that, we tested a couple of bell tents, which had been made on shipboard, to see if they were all right for use later on. Each had a pole going up through the middle; we found they were quite satisfactory and the men used them afterwards to live in on Wrangell Island.
On the twenty-seventh we got a view of the whole sun above the horizon and a good look at the land. In the half light of the previous days it had varied in size from time to time like a mirage and we could not tell whether it was Wrangell Island or not; now it seemed certain that it was not Wrangell so it must be Herald, according to the chart, a surmise which turned out to be correct.
“Herald Island,”—quoting again from the “Coast Pilot,”—“its highest point about 38 miles E. N. E. from Wrangell Island, was discovered and landed upon by Capt. Kellett of H. M. S. Herald, in 1849; it is about 4-1/2 miles long N. W. and S. E. and, being a solid mass of granite about 900 feet high, is almost inaccessible. Lieut. Hooper, of the U. S. S. Corwin, also landed on it, in 1881, and by barometer determined the height of its highest peak, near the southeastern end, to be 1200 feet.”
Mr. Hadley and I got into an argument about something—I never could recall just what it was—and bet a good dinner on it, payable when we got to Victoria. I remember that I lost the bet but I still owe it, because when we finally reached Victoria many months later we had forgotten all about it! Mr. Hadley was one of our most valuable members because he could do so many things of direct use to us in our emergency. He was the oldest man of the party—fifty-seven—an Englishman by birth, who had left England when a lad and been pretty much all over the world, in a variety of occupations, which included a term of enlistment in the United States navy.