For Captain Mayne Brace knew how a boy or man should live, to buck himself up to face the rigours of an Arctic winter.
While the boys are busy striking their share of that lordly plum-pudding below, let me say just one brief word or two about the Walrus herself.
She was almost a new barque then, and good enough to go anywhere and do anything, and belonged to three speculative merchants at Hull. These owners thought they knew quite a deal about Greenland East and Greenland West, and because they had never been to Polar seas, imagined that you had only to have a good ship and a crack crew to steam and sail away to the frozen North, pick up a paying cargo of seals or whales—skins and blubber—and sail back again, giving to the spirited owners a modest 200 per cent. on the capital.
The Walrus had been capitally found, her engines were the best, she was built of teak and braced with oak, fortified forward and all along the water-line, and carried every modern appliance that a barque could bear, with electric light, and—well, and what not?
Then Brace himself had been in the “country,” as the sea of ice is called, all his life, so had Milton the mate—both Dundee men—and the crew of Hull men, Scots, and Shetlanders could hardly have been better chosen.
“I’m going to do my level best,” Captain Mayne Brace had said to his owners, as they all sat together in the cosy saloon, while, hardly a year ago, the Walrus, with steam up, was just about to bear up and away. “I’ll do my best, gentlemen, to bring the Walrus home a bumper ship. I’ll try the sealing first. If they have been scared away by the impulsive Danes, I’ll bear up for the Bay of Baffin and do what I can with the whales, even if I have to winter there and wait for the spring fishing.”
“Bravo, Brace!” said one of the owners. “It is all a bit of a spec on our part, you know. But we’re well insured, Brace, and rather than come home a clean ship, we wouldn’t mind if you left her ribs in Baffin’s Bay.”
Brace smiled. He knew what they meant. He had heard such hints before. But these greedy owners had made just one mistake. They had chosen as skipper an honest man—the noblest work of God.
“I’m going to do the best for us all,” he repeated quietly.
Then good-byes were said, and the ship had sailed.