A boy's-eye view of the Arctic

by Kennett Longley Rawson

The Bowdoin caught in a nip, at Melville Bay.

The day being calm, our sails were not of much assistance, and we had to depend in the main on the Bromfield motor boat. How that little motor ever stood the strain is more than I can understand, but stand it she did, and after ten hours of slow progress we limped into Hopedale. There, since the tide was right, we immediately beached the vessel on an adjacent sand-spit and waited for the low tide to lay bare the propeller. Unfortunately we had arrived at the period of neap or small tides. The rise and fall was so small that the propeller was scarcely more accessible at low tide than at high. Luckily, however, the tides were increasing daily, and in about a week they would enter on the period of spring, or large tides. Therefore, all we could do was to wait philosophically for the much-needed higher water and pull the vessel a little farther in on each high tide.

But this philosophical calm which we had decided to cultivate was not given an opportunity to flourish. Another infliction beset us. We were welcomed back not only by the inhabitants but by a singing, stinging scourge of blood-thirsty mosquitoes. This savage horde had but come to maturity during the past few days, and they descended upon us as did the locusts upon the Egyptians. Before we could stretch mosquito nettings across the hatches, the whole interior of the vessel was infested. We slapped and scratched; sprayed kerosene in all directions; made crude swatters and attacked the noisome pestilence en masse, but all to no avail. In every possible way we strove to devise some means of wholesale annihilation. In the meantime we had stretched netting across all the openings, but this was like locking the stable door after the horse is stolen. We resorted to every conceivable method of extinction and some inconceivable ones, but the insects continued their attacks with unabated ferocity. Nowhere else have I ever encountered such insectivorous persistence. They came from every nook and cranny. But just as we were beginning to despair of discomforting our persecutors, someone had the inspiration of burning plug tobacco. This was an extreme and extravagant measure, dictated by desperation alone, since tobacco was held second only to the safety of the expedition by the devotees of the weed. Regretfully each contributed his quota of tobacco as a burnt offering on the altar of Comfort. In a short time the forecastle was thick with acrid, blue smoke. It was suffocating. But it was efficacious, and soon the inside of the nettings was black with insects struggling for deliverance. We withdrew the nettings, and in a dense swarm they sought safety in flight. Drawing a thick, dizzy breath of relief, we sat on the edges of our bunks and watched the last stragglers disappear. The next problem was to rid the forecastle of smoke, a task almost as difficult as the former problem, but accomplished after much discomfort and effort.

In the midst of the earlier confusion, one wiser than his fellows hit upon what he considered a happy solution of the entire difficulty; to wit, leaving both mosquitoes and smoke in undisputed possession of the forecastle by going aloft and sleeping in the crow’s nest. Ten minutes elapsed, when much to our surprise, we heard the rattle of the rigging and muttered imprecations as our intellectual giant returned to our humble company, covered with mosquitoes. Without stopping to answer our jibes, he disappeared where the smoke was thickest.

CHAPTER VIII
GREENLAND!

AFTER enduring a week of insufficient tides and diabolical attacks on the part of the mosquitoes, we at last managed to put in place the new propeller. What a sigh of relief we all gave when the last nut was screwed on and the little Bowdoin was once more in trim to continue her voyage. We were at last through with Labrador and Hopedale, and ready to square away for that land of many myths—Greenland.

Once more we wended our way through Windy Tickle and Jack Lane’s Bay, where we bade farewell to the Bromfield family. Then with old Sam’s fervent blessing still ringing in our ears, we swung our bow seaward while the last rays of the setting sun streamed on ahead as if to guide our wandering footsteps safe across the treacherous North Atlantic to Godhavn—the harbor of God’s rest.

For three days we sailed on “through many a fair sea circle” till at last we drew nigh to Greenland. Each day the sun held longer in the sky—in fact, after leaving Labrador, we had no real darkness, though the sun set for a few hours each night. The sea was calm with the exception of a few turbulent hours off Hudson’s Straits, when the tidal influence of the bay produced a boisterous chop. The temperature was not very low, and during the long sunny days it was nearly as warm as in many a more favored clime.

On and on we sailed, with nothing to break the vast desolation of the sea, no friendly steamer’s smoke, no glistening sail, not even an iceberg—only the great smooth mounds of water which rolled majestically across the surface of the sea to be followed one upon another in unending sequence, until it seemed that we were “alone on a wide, wide sea.”