Captain James of the Polar Bear and handed him my commission. And such a captain he was! He looked a different race of seafaring men from the captains I had seen in the regular Atlantic service.
His. grizzled hair and beard and clear, keen eyes were gray; that part of his face which showed was about two shades lighter than the color of dried walrus meat and with his silence—except when any of the crew failed in his duties—you would have known, even if you’d met him on Broadway, that his home was somewhere inside the Arctic Circle. He turned me over to his first mate who also looked as if he had a heart of oak and would be equal to any duty he might be called on to perform if it was north of latitude 75 degrees, the latitude at St. Johns.
And, oh, the crew! They were cutters of the old school, every one of them. I had no idea that sailors of their kind were to be found anywhere at this time here on earth except in song and story, but there they actually were all about me in the living flesh. There was an air about them that told as plainly as spoken words they had weathered many a polar storm and that now, even at St. Johns, they were way too far