John Fredericton.
To A.E.
April 10, 1880.
The night before last I dined with Jean Ingelow. I went in to dinner with Alfred Hunt (a water-colour painter to whose work Ruskin is devoted). A very unaffected, intelligent, agreeable man; we had a very pleasant chat. On my other side sat a dear old Arctic Explorer, old Ray. I fell quite in love with him, and with the nice Scotch accent that overtook him when he got excited. Born and bred in the Orkneys, almost, as he said, in the sea; this wild boyhood of familiarity with winds and waves, and storms and sports, was the beginning of the life of adventure and exploration he has led. He told me some very interesting things about Sir John Franklin. He said that great and good as he was there were qualities which he had not, the lack of which he believed cost him his life. He said Sir John went well and gallantly at his end, if he could keep to the lines he had laid down; but he had not "fertility of resource for the unforeseen," and didn't adapt himself. As an instance, he said, he always made his carriers march along a given line. If stores were at A, and the point to be reached B, by the straight line from A to B he would send the local men he had hired through bog and over boulder, whereas if he said to any of them, "B is the place you must meet me at," with the knowledge of natives and the instinct of savages they would have gone with half the labour and twice the speed. He said too that Franklin's party suffered terribly because none of his officers were sportsmen, which, he said, simply means starvation if your stores fail you. We had a long talk about scientific men and their deductions, and he said quaintly, "Ye see, I've just had a lot of rough expeerience from me childhood; and things have happened now and again that make me not just put implicit faith in all scientific dicta. I must tell you, Mrs. Ewing, that when I was a young man, and just back from America and the Arctic Regions, where I'd lived and hunted from a mere laddie, I went to a lecture delivered by one of the verra first men of the day (whose name for that reason I won't give to ye) before some three thousand listeners and the late Prince Consort; and there on the table was the head and antlers of a male reindeer—beasts that, as I'm telling ye, I knew sentimately, and had killed at all seasons. And this man, who, as I'm telling ye, was one of the verra furrrst men of the day (which is the reason why I'm not giving ye his name) spoke on, good and bad, and then he said, 'Ladies and gentlemen, and your Royal Highness, be good enough to look at the head of this Reindeer. Here ye see the antlers,' and so forth, 'and ye'll obsairve that there's a horn that has the shape of a shovel and protrudes over the beast's eyes in a way that must be horribly inconvenient. But when ye see its shape, ye'll perceive one of the most beautiful designs of Providence, a proveesion as we may say; for this inconvenient horn is so shaped that with it the beast can shovel away the deep winter snow and find its accustomed food.'
"And when I heard this I just shook with laughing till a man I knew saw me, and asked what I was laughing at, and I said, 'Because I happen to know that the male reindeer sheds its antlers every year in the beginning of November, snow shovel and all, and does not resume them till spring.'"!!!!!!
April 26, 1880.