"Your best discretion" was underscored.
I called Prendergast, and showed him the letter. Then we called the engineer and asked about the coal. He had not been into the bunkers, but went and returned with his face white, through the black grime, [pg 051] to report "not four days' consumption." By some cursed accident, he said, the bunkers had been filled with barrels of salt-pork and flour!
On this, I ordered a light and went below. There had been some fatal misunderstanding somewhere. The vessel was fitted out as for an arctic voyage. Everywhere hard-bread, flour, pork, beef, vinegar, sour-krout; but, clearly enough, not, at the very best, five days of coal!
And I was to get to Brazil with this old pirate transformed into a provision ship, "at my best discretion."
"Prendergast," said I, "we will take it easy. Were you ever in Bahia?"
"Took flour there in '55, and lay waiting for India-rubber from July to October. Lost six men by yellow-jack."
Prendergast was from the merchant marine. I had known him since we were children. "Ethan," said I, "in my best discretion it would be bad to arrive there before the end of October. Where would you go?"
I cannot say he took the responsibility. He would not take it. You know, my dear, of course, that it was I who suggested Upernavik. From the days of the old marbled paper Northern Regions,—through the quarto Ross and Parry and Back and the nephew Ross and Kane and McClure and McClintock, you know, my dear, what my one passion has been,—to [pg 052] see those floes and icebergs for myself. Surely you forgive me, or at least excuse me. Do not you? Here was this fast steamer under me. I ought not to be in Bahia before October 25. It was June 1. Of course we went to Upernavik.
I will not say I regret it now. Yet I will say that on that decision, cautiously made, though it was "on my discretion," all our subsequent misfortunes hang. The Danes were kind to us,—the Governor especially, though I had to carry the poor fellow bad news about the Duchies and the Danish war, which was all fresh then. He got up a dance for us, I remember, and there I wrote No. 1 to you. I could not of course help—when we left him—running her up a few degrees to the north, just to see whether there is or is not that passage between Igloolik and Prince Rupert's Headland (and by the way there is). After we passed Igloolik, there was such splendid weather, that I just used up a little coal to drive her along the coast of King William's Land; and there, as we waited for little duck-shooting on the edge of a floe one day, as our luck ordered, a party of natives came on board, and we treated them with hard-tack crumbs and whale-oil. They fell to dancing, and we to laughing,—they danced more and we laughed more, till the oldest woman tumbled in her bear-skin bloomers, and came with a smash right on the little cast-iron frame by the wheel, which screened binnacle and compass. My dear child, there was such a hullalu and such a mess [pg 053] together as I remember now. We had to apologize, the doctor set her head as well as he could. We gave them gingerbread from the cabin, to console them, and got them off without a fight. But the next morning when I cast off from the floe, it proved the beggars had stolen the compass card, needle and all.
My dear Mary, there was not another bit of magnetized iron in the ship. The government had been very shy of providing instruments of any kind for Confederate cruisers. Poor Ethan had traded off two compasses only the day before for whalebone spears and skin breeches, neither of which knew the north star from the ace of spades. And this thing proved of more importance than you will think; it really made me feel that the stuff in the books and the sermons about the mariners' needle was not quite poetry.