My Eskimo Friends (1924)

40 MY ESKIMO FRIENDS emergency and seemed to point to the fact that whoever had camped there had met with misadventure, perhaps the break-up of the ice while travelling on the icefields. Caching among boulders all the freight of food and gear the dories had brought ashore, we returned to ship to take off the last odds and ends before we abandoned her. We found to our amazement that though the tide was near flood there was not much water in the well. “By gad, sir,” the skipper said, “though with my own eyes I saw enough splinters cornin’ up and floatin’ off to make a raft, yet here she is, sir, dry as a bone. Not only that, sir, but if the tide come high, and it should, sir, what with all these winds blowin’ from the one quarter, there’s the chance that we can hobble her over the reef.” So to work we went with a will. Thirty-five casks of oil, all that remained of heavy cargo, we threw into the sea, then dropped an anchor some 300 feet ahead, put on all sails, and opened up the engine. With “heave-ho’s” from the crew winding at the winch and “Now she comes, me byes, now she comes,” from the skipper, slowly, inch by inch, the Laddie moved. The crew broke out into a chantey as she gathered way. “An alligator, I calls her,” the skipper cried and called for a “mug up” for all hands. When a light breeze an hour on tore up the last shrouds of fog which had lain over us so long, it revealed the hole into which we had poked the Laddie's nose. The white boils of reefs were everywhere. In no direction could we see a single straight lane of water through which the Laddie could get out to open sea. I knew then that the reason we had not run aground was that a strong magnetic attraction had kept swinging the