"You're going to extremes," he continued; "from the red-hot decks of a burning ship to the ice hummocks of the polar seas. In that country I'll pass on to you a word of warning that Commodore Peary once gave me. Make it your motto in the Arctic. It is this—'Be bold, but never desperate.'"
With a grateful answer, and with his commission as third lieutenant and his appointment as United States Commissioner in his hand, Eric walked out a full-fledged officer of the Coast Guard and Uncle Sam's representative in the Arctic seas.
Several weeks later, Eric reported on board the Bear. He had broken his trip west for a couple of days at home and had managed to snatch the time to run up to his old Coast Guard station and to visit his friend, the puzzle-maker. He really felt that he owed the initial success of his career to the old mathematician, and in this he was far more nearly right even than he imagined. He carried with him into the Arctic the old man's last advice.
"I'm gittin' old," the puzzle-maker had said to him, "not here when you come back. Life—he is like figuring, you think him straight, you work him careful, right every time!"
It was with a keen delight that Eric realized, when he boarded the Bear, that sailorship was not merely a thing of the books. Although he knew that the Coast Guard vessel was a converted whaler, it had never fixed itself in his mind that the Bear was a sailing vessel with auxiliary steam, and that she was handled as a sailing vessel. Barkentine-rigged, with square sails on the foremast and fore-and-aft rig on her main and mizzen, Eric found later by experience that her sailing powers were first-class. His delight in the handling of the ship added to his popularity with his brother officers, all of whom, as older men, had been trained in clipper days.
At Seattle the Bear took aboard the mail for Nome and St. Michael. This consisted of over 400 sacks, an indication of the growth of a city which in the spring of 1897 consisted only of a row of tents on a barren beach. At Unalaska, in the Aleutian Islands, five destitute natives were taken aboard the Bear for transportation to their homes in St. Michael.
Off Nunivak Island, Eric had his first sight of polar ice, but the pack was well broken up and gave little trouble. Norton Sound was comparatively free of ice, however, and the Bear reached St. Michael's ten days later. As St. Michael's Bay was filled with ice-floes, the vessel anchored to await favorable conditions for landing mail. A "lead" or opening in the ice having formed between Whale Island and the mainland, after a clear night's work, the Coast Guard cutter dropped her anchors inside the ice. A couple of days later the floes cleared partly away and the Bear crossed over to Nome.
Endeavoring to make St. Lawrence Island, where the head government reindeer herder was to be landed, the Bear struck a heavy ice pack, and the little vessel had to give up the attempt to land. She worked to the northeast, out of the ice, and the captain changed the ship's course for King Island.
This was the first opportunity Eric had to use his U. S. Commissionership. One of the natives, who had been associated with the white prospectors, was accused of ill-treatment towards his children, a very unusual condition in the Arctic. He had boasted a good deal to the other natives that the United States had no judges so far north, and that the white men could not punish him. In order to teach him a lesson, Eric heard the case, found the man guilty and sentenced the native to a day's imprisonment in the ship's brig, in irons, releasing him shortly before the vessel sailed. A sick native, with his wife and three small children were taken on board, for transportation to the hospital at Nome.
The young lieutenant also made an inspection of Prince of Wales village. During the entire winter there had not been a single case of disturbance and hardly a case of sickness.