With the sturdiness of a battleship and the shapely lines of a Maine built schooner, I regard her the fittest ice-fighter afloat.
PUTTING ON THE GREENHEART ICE-SHEATHING
This view shows the sharpness of the bows and the pronounced rake of the stem
As I write these lines, I see her slowly but surely forcing a way through the crowding ice. I see the black hull hove out bodily onto the surface of the ice by a cataclysm of the great floes. I see her squeezed as by a giant’s hand against a rocky shore till every rib and timber is vocal with the strain.
And I see her out in the North Atlantic lying to for days through a wild autumn northeaster, rudderless, with damaged propeller, and shattered stern post, all pumps going, a scrap of double reefed foresail keeping her up to the wind, riding the huge waves like a seagull till they are tired out.
After my return from the north pole in 1909, the Roosevelt was purchased from the Peary Arctic Club, which had built her for me, by John Arbuckle, the great tea, coffee, and sugar merchant of Brooklyn.
Mr. Arbuckle’s personal hobby was wrecking. He desired the Roosevelt as a powerful ocean-going wrecking-tug. He made some changes in her rigging, removing the mainmast completely, and replacing the foremast with a powerful boom derrick. Air-compressors and additional powerful winches were installed upon her deck. Thus equipped, the Roosevelt assisted in the attempts to save the Yankee, and salvaged other wrecks along the coast as far south as Florida.
Mr. Arbuckle’s death put a stop to this work, and for a year or two the Roosevelt and other craft of his wrecking fleet lay in a Brooklyn slip almost under the east end of the Brooklyn Bridge, where thousands of passers-by could look almost directly down into her big, elliptical smoke-stack.
Then the Roosevelt was purchased by the Bureau of Fisheries of the Department of Commerce for an Alaskan patrol-boat. The bureau changed the Roosevelt to an oil-burner, restored her foremast, and made some minor changes in her accommodations for officers and men.