MacMillan set out from New York just two years[Pg 63] ago to explore Crocker Land, the existence of which Rear Admiral Peary believed he had discovered. According to a message which MacMillan managed to get back some time ago, there is no such land. The American Museum of Natural History, one of the chief backers of the expedition, is sending the schooner Cluett to find MacMillan.
At one of the hospital stations where the schooner will stop, Doctor E. O. Hovey, of the museum, will be taken aboard. Captain H. C. Pickels, of the Cluett, hopes to find MacMillan and his comrades waiting at Etah, the expedition’s base, and to get out before the winter ice closes in on the schooner. In that case he will be back in November. But the schooner carries provisions to last two years.
If MacMillan has to be awaited for or search made for him, the long winter will make neither task easy. The ship will then find herself encompassed with leagues of ice. Eskimo huts will spring up around her like mushrooms, and in the long arctic night it would be difficult to identify the little Cluett with the picture of her taken at New York the other day.
But a closer acquaintance with Captain Pickels and the Cluett helps one’s imagination to bridge the gap. Ever since she was built, four years ago, for the Grenfell mission service on the Labrador coast, Pickels has commanded her. She was designed for work in Northern waters. As the bronze plate in the captain’s cabin sets forth, she was presented to Doctor Wilfred Grenfell in July, 1911, by George B. Cluett. That she went to sea with purposes other than those of the ordinary trading schooner, the plate makes plain in these few words: “The Sea is His and He Made It.” The inscription in the brass band which binds the wheel, “Jesus saith I will make you fishers of men,” serves to distinguish her from the run of fishing craft which infest the Labrador waters. But for these symbols of a higher vocation she is just like them, save that she is much more stanch.
Although the proved nimbleness of the Cluett leads her charterers to hope that she may slip in and out with the rescued MacMillan party in time to get back to New York in November, the way food supplies have been poured into her show that no chances are to be taken in a locality where, as the captain remarked, “ye can’t fetch stuff from a grocery ’round the corner.’” He shed light upon what for a dozen men might be considered a two years’ food supply. Some two thousand pounds of beef, nearly half of it canned and the rest pickled in brine, and an almost equal quantity of mutton and pork, formed the backbone of the stores. Beans and potatoes and barrel on barrel of pilot bread set off this impressive meat supply, which winter hunting is to vary with fresh steaks and roasts.
Several hundred pounds of coffee and a hundred of tea, onions, and many gallons of lime juice to ward off scurvy, were important items; strangely enough, not a particle of chocolate or coco. A comment upon the rather small supply of milk—condensed, of course—as compared with, for one thing, three hundred pounds of rolled oats, drew from the hardy captain the explanation that crews in the North preferred molasses with their oatmeal, and of molasses he had nearly a hundred gallons.
When the schooner starts on the last leg of the journey north, with decks piled high with barrels of kerosene—the Cluett is to be stocked with nearly five thou[Pg 64]sand gallons of kerosene and nine hundred gallons of gasoline for her engines—the only persons aboard beside the crew of eight hardy Nova Scotians, will be the representative of the Natural History Museum. Captain Pickels’ Newfoundland dog, “Chum,” completes the list.
“Belled” Buzzard Appears.
When working on the Charles Dufour farm, two miles north of Vevay, Ind., Charles Hollcraft and son were surprised to hear a bell ringing in the top of a high tree. On investigation they discovered a buzzard with a sheep’s bell strapped around one of its wings in such a manner that at each flap of the wings the bell tinkled. Seven years ago a “belled buzzard” was seen in various parts of Switzerland County at frequent intervals, but finally disappeared.