McClure's Magazine.
THE POLAR ZONE.
A Story by John A. Hill.
VERY few of my friends know me for a seafaring man, but I sailed the salt seas, man and boy, for nine months and eighteen days, and I know just as much about sailing the hereinbefore mentioned salt seas as I ever want to.
Ever so long ago, when I was young and tender, I used to have fits of wanting to go into business for myself. Along about the front edge of the seventies, pay for " toting' ' people and i l truck ' ' over the eastern rail- roads of New England was not of sufficient plenitude to worry a man as to how he would invest his pay check — it was usually invested before he got it. One of my periodical fits of wanting to go into business for myself came on suddenly one day, when I got home and found another baby in the house. I was right in the very worst spasms of it when my brother Enoch, whom I hadn't seen for seventeen years, walked in on me.
Enoch was fool enough to run away to sea when he was twelve years old — I suppose he was afraid he would get the chance to do something besides whaling. We were born down New Bedford way, where another boy and myself were the only two fellows in the district, for over forty years, who didn't go hunting whales, icebergs, foul smells, and scurvy, up in King Frost's bailiwick, just south of the Pole.
Enoch had been captain and part owner of a Pacific whaler; she had recently burned at Honolulu, and he was back home now to
buy a new ship. He had heard that I, his little brother John, was the best locomotive engi- neer in the whole world, and had come to see me — partly on account of relationship, but more to get my advice about buying a steam whaling-ship. Enoch knew more about whales and ships and such things than you could put down in a book, but he had no more idea how steam propelled a ship than I had what a " skiwie tricer " was.
Well, before the week was out, Enoch showed me that he was pretty well fixed in a financial way, and as he had no kin but me that he cared about, he offered me an inter- est in his new steam whaler, if I would go as chief engineer with her to the North Pacific.
The terms were liberal and the chance a good one, so it seemed, and after a good many consultations, my wife agreed to let me go for one cruise. She asked about the stops to be made in going around the Horn, and figured mentally a little after each place was named — I believe now, she half expected that I would desert the ship and walk home from one of these stops, and was figuring on the time it would take me.
When the robins were building their nests, the new steam whaler, "Champion," left New Bedford for parts unknown (via the Horn), with the sea-sickest chief engineer that ever smelt fish oil. The steam plant wasn't very much — two boilers and a plain twenty-eight by thirty-six double engine, and any amount of hoisting rigs, blubber-boilers, and other paraphernalia. We refitted in San Francisco, and on a clear summer morning turned the white-painted figure-head of the
Copyright, 1898, by the S. S. McClure Co. All rights reserved.
