“‘Oh! dere’s plenty news!’
“‘Out with it, man! What is it?’
“‘Oh! de Sout States dey go agin de Nort’ States, and dere’s plenty fight!’
“I heard the answer, and wondering what strange complication of European politics had kindled another Continental war, called this Polar Emmæus to the quarter deck. Had he any news from America?
“‘Oh! ’tis ’merica me speak! De Sout’ States, you see? and dere’s plenty fight!’
“Yes, I did see! but I did not believe that he told the truth, and awaited letters which I knew must have come out with the Danish vessel, and which were immediately sent for to the Government House.”
The condition of the schooner necessitated putting in at Halifax for repairs, and, four days after leaving, they made the Boston Lights. “We picked up a pilot,” writes Dr. Hayes, “out of the thickest fog that I have ever seen south of the Arctic Circle, and with a light wind stood into harbor. As the night wore on the wind fell away almost to calm; the fog thickened more and more, if that were possible, as we sagged along over the dead waters toward the anchorage. The night was filled with an oppressive gloom. The lights hanging at the mast-heads of the vessels which we passed had the ghastly glimmer of tapers burning in a charnel-house. We saw no vessel moving but our own, and even those which lay at anchor seemed like phantom ships floating in the murky air. I never saw the ship’s company so lifeless, or so depressed, even in times of real danger.”
“I landed on Long Wharf,” he continues, “and found my way into State Street. Two or three figures were moving through the thick vapors, and their solemn foot-fall broke the worse than Arctic stillness. I reached Washington Street, and walked anxiously westward. A newsboy passed me. I seized a paper, and the first thing which caught my eye was the account of the Ball’s Bluff battle, in which had fallen many of the noblest sons of Boston; and it seemed as if the very air had shrouded itself in mourning for them, and that the heavens wept tears for the city’s slain. I was wending my way to the house of a friend, but I thought it likely that he was not there. I felt like a stranger in a strange land, and yet every object which I passed was familiar. Friends, country, everything seemed swallowed up in some vast calamity, and, doubtful and irresolute, I turned back sad and dejected, and found my way on board again through the dull, dull fog.”
Dr. Hayes made another journey beyond the Arctic Circle in 1869, in the Panther, as the guest of the artist Bradford. Over a thousand miles of the Greenland coast was visited, terminating a good way beyond the last outpost of civilization on the globe, in the midst of the much-dreaded “ice-pack” of Melville Bay.
Transcriber’s Note: image is clickable for a larger version