“After many months of ‘solitary confinement,’ we escaped and reached home at last. Many of the men’s relations met us on the pier, dressed in deepest mourning; the ‘blacks,’ as such dress is called, had been donned for us, for our ship had been reported as lost with all hands!
“Life in that lonesome ice-pack was a weary ‘bide,’—
“‘Day after day, day after day,
And neither breath nor motion.’
“No, not as much wind as would have sufficed to lift a snowflake, never a cloud in the sky, and the sun going round and round and round, but far above the horizon even at midnight. We tired of reading books; we tired of card-playing and games on the ice; we even tired of music itself. Monotony generated ennui; ennui bred melancholy; plenty of exercise on the ice alone could save us from succumbing to actual illness. We knew that well, but we were thoroughly apathetic, and did not care to take it. The captain, a young and energetic man, at last hit upon a happy expedient which succeeded most completely in restoring something of life and animation to the crew, who were rapidly merging into a state of Rip Van Winkleism, painful to behold. He determined to form a camp three miles away from the ship. Simply walking to and from it would be some little excitement, it would be exercise with a purpose, and exercise, as medical men will tell you, without pleasure or purpose, is entirely useless in a hygienic point of view.
“Our captain, the first and second mates, and myself were seated at breakfast one morning when he made his proposal.
“‘Doctor,’ he said—NB, he called me ‘Doctor’ always, but at that time I had no more business with the title than the tailor had—
“‘Doctor, how are the men getting on forward?’
“‘They haven’t much life in them,’ I replied; ‘they are all making silver rings now out of sixpenny bits and shillings. That is the latest fad, but the coins will soon be all used up; then I suppose all hands will go to sleep for a month or two.’
“‘I think, doctor,’ said Captain Peters, ‘that their livers want stirring up. Eh? Don’t you, doctor?’