Captain Mayne Brace knew well what these regions were, for he had himself taken part in a German expedition that had gone out many years before, and had noted the deficiencies thereof.
So it was he alone who superintended everything.
Though aided nobly by his mate, and even his old bo’s’n and his Arctic spectioneer, it was no easy task that he had set himself to perform. They were going to a great snow-clad continent, on which there are neither houses nor towns any more than there are in the moon, and everything in the shape of repairs to engines, to interior, or to any part or portion of the ship, must be done by the artificers, mechanics, and engineers whom he must carry.
Many a long month’s thought and calculation this gave him, and many a long journey also, to and fro in the train, for Dundee itself was to have the honour of building and fitting out the Sea Elephant.
Captain Mayne Brace had no children of his own. He used to say that he never could see any fun in a sailor marrying, who was here to-day and away to-morrow, bound for the back of Bellfuff—wherever that may be—with only a plank or two betwixt him and eternity, and liable any day or hour to have to make a sudden call at the door of Davy Jones’ Locker.
Ingomar quite agreed with him as to the inadvisability of leaving widows behind them to mourn their loss for the rest of their lives.
“Mourn for the rest of their lives? Eh? Humph!” That was Captain Brace’s reply. And proof enough, too, I think, that he was not likely to run the risk of wrecking his barque of life on the reefs and rocks of matrimony.
But Brace had been a saving man though no niggard, and therefore he did not begrudge taking Walt and Charlie with him, to see the beauties of bonnie Dundee whenever school terms permitted.
The companionship of such a man as Captain Brace was indeed a liberal education in itself for them. For even during their holidays he would never suffer them to be altogether idle, and he was, when time admitted, their tutor in everything pertaining to the working of a ship.
The Dundee shipbuilders were honest. They considered that their reputation was quite hung on gimbals with regard to the laying down and building