Our celebration was of the primitive order. We saluted the town with one of the largest balanced stones, which we rolled down from the cliff above; and made an egg-nogg of eider eggs; and the men had a Hosky ball; and, in a word, we all did our best to make the day differ from other days—which attempt failed. Still, God ever bless the fourth!
The sixth was Sunday, and we attended church in the morning at the schoolmaster’s. The service consisted of a long-winded hymn, and a longer winded sermon, in the Esquimaux—surely the longest of long-winded languages. The congregation were some two dozen men and women, not counting our party.
We put to sea in the afternoon. The weather was soft and warm on shore; but outside it was perfectly delightful: no wind—the streams of ice beyond enforcing a most perfect calm upon the water; the thermometer in the sunshine frequently as high as 76°, and never sinking below 30° in the shade. I basked on deck all night, sleeping in the sun.
And such a night! I saw the moon at midnight, while the sun was slanting along the tinted horizon, and duplicated by reflection from the water below it: the dark bergs to seaward had outlines of silver; and two wild cataracts on the shore-side were falling from ice-backed cliffs twelve hundred feet into the sea.
July 7. I was awakened from my dreamy sleep to receive the visits of a couple of boats that were working slowly to us through the floes. An English face—two English faces—twelve English faces: what a happy sight! We had had no one but ourselves to speak our own tongue to for three hundred days, and were as glad to listen to it as if we had been serving out the time in the penitentiary of silence at Auburn or Sing-Sing. Their broad North Briton was music. It was not the offensive dialect of the provincial Englishman, with the affectation of speaking his language correctly; but a strong and manly home-brew of the best language in the world for words of sincere and hearty good-will. They had to turn up their noses at our seal’s-liver breakfast; but, when they heard of our winter trials, they stuffed down the seal without tasting it. I felt sorry after they were off, that I had not taken their names down every one.
The whaling vessels to which they returned were in the freer water outside the shore stream, the Jane O’Boness, Captain John Walker; and the Pacific, Captain Patterson. These gentlemen boarded us as soon as we got through the ice to them. They thought our escape miraculous; and it was some time before they found words to congratulate us. “Augh!” and “Wonderful!” with a peculiar interchange of looks, was all they said.
These burned children dread the fire; and their conversation opened our eyes to dangers we had gone through half unconsciously. Few masters in the whaling trade but have at some time suffered wreck. Two seasons ago, this veteran Patterson saw his ship thrust bodily through another, and then the transfixed and transfixing vessels were both eaten up together by the greedy floes. He stepped from the last remnant of his buried sail on to the hummocks: “And that’s a’ that e’e ha’ seen o’ her!”
They left us newspapers, potatoes, turnips, eggs, and fresh beef enough to eat out every taint of scurvy! They took letters from us for home, and cheered ship when we parted. I must not soon forget the Pacific and Jane O’Boness.
(Editor’s note.) The next day they made Uppernavik. July and a good part of August were spent in a vain endeavor to return to Lancaster Sound and complete their explorations in Wellington Channel; but the ships were so beset with floes and icebergs that this project had to be abandoned. On August 21st the expedition headed homeward, and it arrived in New York on September 30, 1851.