Adventures in Alaska

by Samuel Hall Young

The ship itself was of unusual pattern. Her owner called her the Mudhen. Her three masts stood stiff and straight in a row and were the same height. Her lines were not particularly elegant, and her small engine could only push her through calm seas at the rate of five miles an hour. But she was a comfortable ship and had one quality in particular which overbalanced all the drawbacks and made her the boat for us—she was built for "bucking ice." She had extra heavy timbers, especially about her bow. In spite of her slowness, she was an ideal craft for venturing into Arctic ice-floes. She would come at a good speed, bow on, against a huge berg and bring up with a jar that would shake her as a rat shaken by a terrier, and send your plate of polar bear meat into your lap. Then she would recover from her backward bounce and calmly proceed on her way undented and unharmed. Mr. Scull of Philadelphia, who has sailed the world over, could never get used to bumping the ice. He and I would be bent over the chess board, absorbed in a difficult situation, when—bang! would go the schooner against the ice, and recoil, trembling like a hound. I would grab for the tottering chessmen, while Scull would jump right into the air with his hair standing straight up on each side of his bald pate like the ears of a horned owl. He would rush frantically out of the cabin door, lean far over the vessel's side, train his big eye-glasses on the ship's bow and watch for signs of her filling. Then he would come back muttering strange words in any of the five or six languages of which he is the master, and resume his study of the game, only to repeat the performance at the next bump. "Oh!" he would say, "it hurts me more than it hurts the ship"; which was undoubtedly true. I always had better luck in chess with Scull when we were bucking ice.

The personnel of our party was like some landscapes, varied and interesting. The commander of the expedition and its manager, was Captain Kleinschmidt, sailor, miner, hunter, author and moving-picture man. He chartered the Abler and hired her crew, who were as cosmopolitan as it is possible for crew to be—the captain, a Swede; the mate, a Dane; the engineers (brothers) German-Americans; the cook, a "Jap"; the crew composed of one American, one Russian and five Eskimos. There were two taxidermists to take care of the birdskins, bugs, mammals, etc., collected.

Of the four hunters, who, with Captain Kleinschmidt, financed the expedition, three were from Philadelphia: Scull, our polyglot interpreter, a publisher of books; Collins, a manufacturer; and Lovering, a young man who had lived part of his life in Wyoming. The fourth, Dr. Elting, was a surgeon of reputation from Albany, N. Y. All were experienced hunters, Scull and Collins having followed trails in Africa and America, Dr. Elting in the Western States and Canada, and Lovering in the West. As for myself, the guest without responsibility or care, "taken along," as the captain said, "to lend dignity to the expedition," you can call me by my common names: "The Sour-dough Preacher," "The Mushing Parson," "The Alaska Sky-Pilot," or any of half a dozen Northwestern cognomens, of all of which I am equally proud.

My object in joining this expedition was, first, to have a big hunt and a grand rest. But, more than the outing, I valued the privilege of exploring ground untrodden by the missionary, and, if possible, doing something towards bringing the Gospel to the heathen Eskimo of the Alaskan and Siberian shores.

We were all "out for a lark," glad beyond expression to be hundreds of miles from a telegram or newspaper, to be able to wear our dirty clothes and eat in our shirtsleeves without shame; to forget that such things existed as automobiles or stiff collars or dinner parties. We had four months of a royal good time—along the Asiatic Coast after Siberian sheep, on the Alaska Peninsula for caribou and brown bears, on Kenai Peninsula after moose, white sheep and black bear, among the islands of the Southern Alaska Coast and Bering Sea with the bird and seal rookeries, and pursuing polar bear amid the ice-floes of the Arctic Ocean.

We visited many Eskimo villages; we shot for the museums hundreds of varieties of birds on the Siberian and Alaskan Coasts; we captured new species of beetles, moths, butterflies and other insects; the camera fiends and moving-picture man reveled in novel scenes, animate and inanimate. We buffeted storms, pounded ice and sailed sunny seas.

But the climax of our joyous outing was the three or four days we spent among the walrus herds off the Northern Siberian Coast. Scull and Collins, who had hunted everything in Africa from dikdik to rhinoceros, declared that none of their experiences in that continent approached in thrilling interest their days with the walrus herds.

For the walrus is sui generis: there is no other mammal at all like him in appearance, habits, habitat or characteristics. He is the least known or written about of all the larger animals. No thorough study has ever been made of him. More is known of the habits of the extinct woolly elephant—the mammoth, whose bones, tusks, and even hair and skin we find on the Alaskan Coast—than the walrus. And what has been written and the common ideas concerning this animal are so erroneous as to be funny.

A century or so ago a naturalist-traveler, writing about the Eskimos and the morse, as the walrus was then called, said that the tusks of the animal are for the purpose of pulling himself up the icy mountains where he lives; that his habit is to thus work his way up to the top of the dizziest peak; that the Eskimos pursue him there and cut holes through the thick skin of his flippers unknown to the huge pachyderm, whose hide is impervious to sensation. Then, having passed strong ropes through these holes and tied them to the jutting crags, they raise a hullabaloo, and the walrus, alarmed, precipitating himself down the mountain, jerks off his skin, which the Eskimos then use in the construction of their boats and houses. The year before our hunt, a California gentleman, interested in Captain K.'s moving pictures, asked him whether the walrus brought forth their young alive or laid eggs and hatched them.