The Whitebear steam yacht, owned and commanded by Captain Jacob Vane, had sailed from England, and was bound for the North Pole.

 

“I’ll find it—I’m bound to find it,” was the Captain’s usual mode of expressing himself to his intimates on the subject, “if there’s a North Pole in the world at all, and my nephews Leo and Alf will help me. Leo’s a doctor, almost, and Alf’s a scientific Jack-of-all-trades, so we can’t fail. I’ll take my boy Benjy for the benefit of his health, and see if we don’t bring home a chip o’ the Pole big enough to set up beside Cleopatra’s Needle on the Thames embankment.”

 

There was tremendous energy in Captain Vane, and indomitable resolution; but energy and resolution cannot achieve all things. There are other factors in the life of man which help to mould his destiny.

 

Short and sad and terrible—ay, we might even say tremendous—was the Whitebear’s wild career.

 

Up to the time of her meeting with the Eskimos, all had gone well. Fair weather and favouring winds had blown her across the Atlantic. Sunshine and success had received her, as it were, in the Arctic regions. The sea was unusually free of ice. Upernavik, the last of the Greenland settlements touched at, was reached early in the season, and the native interpreter Anders secured. The dreaded “middle passage,” near the head of Baffin’s Bay, was made in the remarkably short space of fifty hours, and, passing Cape York into the North Water, they entered Smith’s Sound without having received more than a passing bump—an Arctic kiss as it were—from the Polar ice.

 

In Smith’s Sound fortune still favoured them. These resolute intending discoverers of the North Pole passed in succession the various “farthests” of previous explorers, and the stout brothers Vandervell, with their cousin Benjy Vane, gazed eagerly over the bulwarks at the swiftly-passing headlands, while the Captain pointed out the places of interest, and kept up a running commentary on the brave deeds and high aspirations of such well-known men as Frobisher, Davis, Hudson, Ross, Parry, Franklin, Kane, McClure, Rae, McClintock, Hayes, Hall, Nares, Markham, and all the other heroes of Arctic story.

 

It was an era in the career of those three youths that stood out bright and fresh—never to be forgotten—this first burst of the realities of the Arctic world on minds which had been previously well informed by books. The climax was reached on the day when the Eskimos of the far north were met with.

 

But from that time a change took place in their experience. Fortune seemed to frown from that memorable day. We say “seemed,” because knitted brows do not always or necessarily indicate what is meant by a frown.

分享到：