The Log of Bob Bartlett E-Book

Robert A. Bartlett

• Herausgeber: Alien Ebooks
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Serie: The True Story of Forty Years of Seafaring and Exploration
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 399

Beschreibung

Bartlett was an American born in the British colony of Newfoundland. After an early apprenticeship involving cod fishery and seal hunting he left for a life of more than 50 years mapping and exploring Arctic waters, including captaining the ship used by Commander Peary's attempts to reach the North Pole.

Leseprobe

© Pinchot.

Captain Robert A. Bartlett.

The Log of Bob Bartlett

The True Story of Forty Years of

Seafaring and Exploration

By

Captain Robert A. Bartlett

Master Mariner

26 Illustrations

THE LOG OF BOB BARTLETT

Copyright, 1928

by

G. P. Putnam’s Sons

To My Mother

FOREWORD TO SIXTH PRINTING

As I lean over the Taffrail and reset the hands on the face of the Log Dial, and note the miles logged since the Log Book was started I never dreamed that so many young and old folks would be interested in reading it. The many letters that I have received say that they have had fair weather with me through the Log. The Publishers now say that they, too, are willing to endorse the commendation of my reading Friends, and have decided to send it on another voyage. I trust that a continuation of fair weather and smooth seas as of yore will go with it and that the influence of Neptune and Aeolus will see that it is so.

FOREWORD

It seems there is a fashion of writing Forewords to books. I had not intended doing it—after all, a sailor isn’t apt to be fashionable. But two things made me change my mind since I have logged off the chapters of this story of mine.

Just after we got back from the Baffin Land Expedition of the summer of 1927, a letter came to me. I have had a good share of letters in my time, some of them flattering (plenty contrary!) and many from really important people. But never came a pleasanter, more surprising letter than this one. I wanted to use it in my book. But the book was written.

“We will make a berth for it,” I said to myself. “A Foreword is the place. If the book cannot carry that additional sail she’s not fit for sea anyway.”

Here’s the letter, and that’s all I know about this cheerful friend:

Captain Bob Bartlett,

c/o Explorers Club,

47 W. 76th Street,

New York, N. Y.

Dear Bob:

I don’t know who is paying you wages at the moment, but I do know the whole world is in your debt. If your salary were based on the value of your services to mankind and your employer, you would be in the millionaire class, but damn it Bob, that isn’t the way with mankind. An inventor hits on a lucky device for polishing teeth and pulls off a fortune—you, not only take care of yourself, but a dozen tenderfeet through a thousand miles of arctic waste, and what?—Draw maybe just enough to carry you, while you are trying to find another job. But, we love you just the same. We admire your fearless courage, your clear head, your mastery over the forces of nature, your rugged grandeur, for you really are a master of men and natural forces—a giant among pigmies.

In a thousand years you will be more famous than today. But, meanwhile hasn’t mankind a duty? I think so, and I have one too, namely, to do my little bit, which is to divvy my assets to the extent of a Fifty, which I am enclosing herewith.

I have known you a good many years, but I don’t want you to know my real name, lest you might hesitate to accept the check. Just consider it a little payment on account of the great debt the world owes to you, and which under no circumstances is it ever apt to pay.

Sincerely yours,

  (Signed) Jedediah Tingle.[1]

Address—

Care of American Trust Co.,

  209 Montague Street,

    Brooklyn, N. Y.

[1]

Reprint from the Bowling Green Column of the New York Evening Post.

Mr. Jedediah Tingle

Occasionally, in recent years, various people have been startled to receive a letter, most charmingly phrased, expressing gratitude for something they have done or painted or written or said, and signed Jedediah Tingle. These people have justly suspected that Jedediah Tingle is a pseudonym, but they have found that the check was perfectly valid and cashable or the book worth reading.

Now one of the most pleasing adventures we have had lately was a call from Mr. Tingle himself. He did not come, we must explain, to exert his benevolence upon ourself, but to consult us about a certain phase of his recreation of secretly rewarding, in a modest way, those whose works appealed to him. He did not tell us his real name, and we have no desire to know who he is, other than that he is a thoughtful business man who has found great delight in these mysterious gestures of helpfulness. To identify him would not only necessarily put an end to his cheerful avocation, but would also deprive the situation of its unique charm.

The secret circle of those who have received these letters from Jedediah Tingle is a curiously assorted one. We have had some of the letters shown us, in the past, by those who have received them. These letters have gone to Cabinet Ministers and to obscure, struggling poets, to great writers and to unknown heroes. But the point is this—while Mr. Tingle tells us he has greatly enjoyed the occasional acknowledgments that have come to him by being addressed to the banks on which his checks are drawn, certain individuals and newspapers have made determined attempts to unmask his innocent secret. We should like to ask all Managing Editors and others to be good sports and not spoil this admirable innocent generosity by trying to discover its source.

Christopher Morley.

*     *     *     *     *     *

The undersigned feels mildly resentful at being called a “pseudonym.” He harbors a strong suspicion that he is the living incarnation of his own great-grandfather whose name he has taken and who in turn came from generations of Abou Ben Adhems.

In 1820 they placed his bones in a country graveyard in the Middle West, now an abandoned tangle of grasses, briars and broken trees, but that event was probably merely an episode in an eternal mission, which is to bring smiles and tender thoughts to the great in heart—in high and low places. To comfort and cheer those who do exceptional things, or suffer.

Jedediah Tingle.

Well, I read my book all over again. And changed a bit here and there, and threw a few paragraphs overboard. It is my book now about the way I would like to have it—although of course I wish it were more interesting and better written.

At least there is no meanness in it; and, I think, no bitterness and no criticism. I am not taking a swipe at anyone. I am not trying to open up old sores and air old grievances. At the worst, at least it is all set down with a smile.

My log is just a simple yarn of a plain man—a man not particularly well equipped, who has seen a lot of life in queer ways; who has had his share of success and discouragement and excitement; and who is grateful for what life has given him in adventures, fun and friends. And I hope the book finds a fine fair wind to take it to the harbor of its readers’ friendship.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

PAGE

I.

The Trouble with Women

3

II.

A Mangy Lion

17

III.

The Sea is a Hard Master

30

IV.

Meant for a Minister

42

V.

My First Shipwreck

61

VI.

I Carry Bananas

75

VII.

“

Swiles!

”

90

VIII.

Down to the Banks

104

IX.

I Fall in Love

117

X.

Skipper at Last

128

XI.

Polar Poison

144

XII.

A Narrow Escape

160

XIII.

To the North Pole

179

XIV.

A World of Lunatics

199

XV.

Face to Face with a King

218

XVI.

My Big Chance Comesand Goes

236

XVII.

Shipwreck and Death

254

XVIII.

I Go for Help

268

XIX.

But the North Still Called

280

XX.

Skipper U. S. N.

290

XXI.

Alaskan Adventures

304

XXII.

North Again!

320

XXIII.

The Sea is Made of Mothers’ Tears

329

XXIV.

Homeward Bound

348

ILLUSTRATIONS

FACING PAGE

Captain Robert A. Bartlett

Frontispiece

Dr. Knud Rasmussen and Captain Bartlett

18

Capt. Abram Bartlett

36

Mrs. William Bartlett

46

Brigus, Newfoundland

48

Captain Rupert W. Bartlett

54

Barquentine

Corisande

62

S. S.

Grand Lake

in the Ice

78

Tracking the

Panther

through the Ice

90

Sealing Steamers Jammed in the Narrows

96

Splitting Codfish

106

Squidding Along the Labrador

110

Drying Fish in Newfoundland

114

Sam Bromfield, a “Character” on the Labrador Coast

130

Cap’n Bob Bartlett

134

A Stern View of the

Roosevelt

174

The

Neptune

180

The Hubbard Medal

210

Captain William Bartlett

254

The

Karluk

Beset in the Ice

258

The

Karluk

Imprisoned in the Ice Floe

262

Captain John Bartlett

280

Cap’n Bob Turns Diver

300

The

Morrissey

at Turnavik

322

A Model of the

Terra Nova

326

“Hawthorne,” Home of the Bartletts at Brigus

348

THE LOG OF BOB BARTLETT

CHAPTER I THE TROUBLE WITH WOMEN

I have been shipwrecked three times. Three times I have seen my own ships sink, or be crushed to kindling wood against the rocks. Yet I love the sea as a dog loves its master who clouts it for the discipline of the house.

“How does it feel to face death?” is a question that has often been put to me.

“That depends,” are always my first words in reply. And it does. Because, if the peril is short and swift, as when a man points a gun at your head, that is one thing. But if you have to cling, half frozen, for many hours to the rigging of a sinking ship, not knowing which moment may be your last, that is another sort of shiver altogether.

One misery I have been spared; the feeling in the face of death that I was leaving wife and children behind me. I never got married. I don’t think a seafaring man ought to because women so often break your heart. A fisherman I knew got wrecked on the Labrador one winter. He left his wife in a snow igloo while he went to the nearest village for food. When he got back to his wife he found the dogs had eaten her. He never got over the shock; which shows what a care and sorrow a woman can be under some circumstances.

Naturally, my life has been mostly with men, hard men, good and bad men, brave men and cowards; but men all the time. One good look and I can tell what a man is like. A couple of questions and I know his character. I can tell whether a man can be counted on or not in a pinch. I can almost say how he will behave when he dies.

Yet, strange to say, I have learned a deal about women too. I don’t claim to understand them. They probably don’t even understand themselves. But I know how a woman acts under circumstances, and why. Maybe it is this knowledge that has kept me a single man. Women don’t often go where I have gone. However, curious to relate, there have nearly always been women on my most exciting voyages.

When I went close to the North Pole with Peary, we had Eskimo women aboard the ship. When the Karluk sank in the middle of the Polar Sea one black January night, with the temperature fifty-four degrees below zero, one of the bravest persons in our party was an Eskimo woman—a wife and mother.

Once I was shipwrecked in the North Atlantic and it was a woman that smiled when the great moment of disaster came. The biggest influence in my forty years of going to sea has been a woman—my mother. She is still alive and now and then still tells me where to get off.

You might say it is not fair to look on Eskimos in the same light as one would look on white women. That is not true. An Eskimo woman cooks and sews, gossips and laughs, loves her babies and worries about her husband every bit as much as any white wife does.

There was Inuaho on Peary’s ship the Roosevelt. She was a fine bronze study as she sat stripped to the waist sewing away on her skin boots. Her name wasn’t easy to say so we called her “The Black Mare,” from the long ebony locks that hung over her shoulders.

One day Inuaho came to me on the ice outside the Roosevelt and said:

“Captain, you watch my man?”

I could see her hands were gripped tight and her eyes were wide open.

“Sure I watch him. Why?”

“Because Pearyaksoh (the big Peary) do not care if he die. My man go where Peary go. I am afraid.”

I patted the girl on her back and told her the best I could that I wouldn’t let anything happen to her man. That summer her baby came; its father was one of the first human beings to reach the North Pole. In 1917 I returned to Greenland and told the story to the sturdy little hunter growing up.

In 1914 the Karluk sank north of Alaska. She was crushed to kindling wood in the ice. We were many miles from the land. The weather was dreadfully cold. In the biting wind the powdery snow drifted ceaselessly across the wild and broken ice fields. It was a gamble whether we should ever get back. Four men started off towards Alaska and were never heard of again. The rest of us struggled down to Wrangell Island. The trip took weeks and was filled with terrible hardships.

We had an Eskimo woman along. She was our seamstress. She was not trained to sledge work for she had lived a sheltered life in the little village where we had picked her up. She was not like the North Greenland Eskimo. I should say that she was as unprepared for hardship as most white women. Did she whine? Listen:

“Where in hell are my boots?” I yelled at the top of my lungs in the confusion that followed the sinking of the ship. Nobody paid any attention.

Five minutes later I felt a woman’s fingers on my wrist. I whirled around in the dusk and flying snow. There was Inaloo.

“I fix Captain’s boots,” she said.

I grabbed them out of her hand. I suddenly noticed her lips were bleeding.

“Somebody hit you?” I asked.

“No.”

“You fell down?”

“No.”

“Well, what in the devil is the matter with your face?”

“I chew Captain’s boots.”

Then I realized that she had dashed into the cabin, at risk of her life, when the ice was crushing the ship, and saved my spare boots. I knew they were wet and in bad shape. She had taken them out and in the Eskimo way had chewed the thick leather into a pliable state and filled the soles with grass. In the cold and snow, and with the hard hide, she had split her lips in twenty places. But she had saved my feet.

In the long hard weeks that followed she was like that all the way. Time after time she helped bind up frozen feet and fingers; she went easy with her share of the grub when we were short; she mended our clothes and cleaned our boots; and she was always there with a smile when things looked darkest.

White women are just as brave and just as fine when they have to be. Of course when it comes to wearing fandangles in competition with other women for the eyes of a man, she has got to be on the job if she is going to make progress. But jam her up against a stone wall of necessity and I’ll stake my hat on the average woman being full-and-by with the best of us.

I remember one girl down the Newfoundland coast. She was from a good family in Halifax. She fell in love with a young sailor and went with him to live outside of a little village near my home. I suppose the excitement of being married and living in a new country carried her along the first year or two. She was pretty free and could visit about while her man went to sea. But children came along one after another, and pretty soon she was tied down as much by poverty as by her brood.

The sealing season begins in March. Men are poor in Newfoundland. Late in February, after they have cut enough wood for their families and when their winter supply of salt fish is getting low, they begin to go down to St. John’s to join the sealing fleet. Usually they walk. Young men think nothing of covering a hundred miles or so overland, through deep snow and blizzards.

The bad part of it is after they have gone through two months, maybe three, of hard sealing life, they come back with total earnings of as low as $15! Sometimes they make $50 for a sealing cruise; sometimes $300—but that is very rare. Usually it is around $25 to $60.

Think of it. This $50, let us say, represents the total season’s earnings for the head of the family. Some of it goes for the man’s outfit and clothing. Some of it he wastes in knick-knacks for the children. After three or four months of ice, and snow, and cold, and incredible toil, he goes back to his woman with maybe only $25 in cash!

That Spring the girl I am telling about kisses her man goodbye. All the little children kissed him goodbye—five of them, as I remember it. He had to go. The $25 or $50 he would bring back must pay for the flour and medicine and tools vital to the life of the little family.

Three days after he left it came on to blow. Snow mixed with the wind. The little shack where lived the mother and her children became isolated. It was isolated for a month. It was half isolated for another month. In the third month the mother broke out and got help to bury one of her babies. Meanwhile she cut wood and boiled salt fish and waited for her man to bring back $25.

He never came back. After a while the girl gave up. She let people come and help her support the children; she was a good sport about it. She went right on working and made enough money so that she could have her little house. She fished and chopped wood like a man. She did not forget that her man had gone down in the sealer Southern Cross in a brave effort to provide for her. The children were half his and to this day she tries to carry his load as well as hers.

I have an idea that all women are good to start with. The trouble with so many of them is that they have too easy a time. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe if they didn’t have an easy time they would lose that ornamental edge which catches the eye of a man skilled in a woman’s fine points. Anyway, I know plenty of cases where my theory holds true.

There was a good girl I knew who turned up her nose at lots of fine young fellows because they didn’t have enough money or hold down big jobs. She was out to marry a Captain. She finally did.

Now some Captains like to take their wives to sea with them. But all sailors know that a woman on board ship is bad luck. I once sailed as second mate with a Captain who took his wife along. She brought misfortune from the day we cast off until we reached port again.

On the second day out I fell down the hatch and nearly put out one of my eyes. My shin had to have four stitches taken in it. Next the first mate broke his knuckle when he swung at one of the deck-hands. The sailor dodged and the mate struck the oaken pin rail with his unprotected knuckles.

The worst tragedy came in the second week out. Our steward had a bad knee. I suppose it was rheumatism. He suffered terrible pain. You know the average merchant ship doesn’t carry a doctor. She has a medicine chest aboard with a book of directions. When anybody is ill the Captain opens the chest and treats them according to the book. If he gets the symptoms wrong, or reads off the wrong page, then there is old Nick to pay.

When the steward complained about his knee the Captain’s wife insisted on taking charge. She got the book out of the medicine chest and read it all through from beginning to end. I think that’s what set her adrift. Anyhow it turned out afterwards that she treated the steward for something on page 109 when what he had was on page 209. He became terribly ill on the second day of the treatment and just before we reached port he passed away. There was an investigation and the Captain got in a lot of legal trouble that I don’t think he ever cleared up. Next time he put to sea his wife stayed home where she belonged.

Yes, I have sailed all over the globe and often been shipwrecked. And I have handled some thick-skinned humanity in my time. But my greatest danger and my toughest task always has been the women-folk.

I remember once I had just rounded to from a cruise to the West Indies. I had a cargo of bananas on board that had to be discharged. As the job would take some days I stowed away in a boarding house. The housekeeper was a fine up-standing woman of about forty. I could see right off that she was built for hard work and heavy weather. Though she had a nice face she would never take a beauty prize.

The second night I came home for supper she had a rose in the vase up on my bureau. About two minutes after I had come in and was about to cast adrift for a bath, I heard a knock on the door. It was my hostess.

“Everything all right, Captain?” she asked.

“Fine as a fiddle,” says I.

“Can I do anything for you?”

I wanted to tell her she could get out, but instead I said. “Yes, you can. If you will wait a minute you can take this shirt and send it to the laundry.”

Would you believe it, she was insulted! Before I knew from which quarter the wind blew I was apologizing. And the minute a fellow starts to apologize he’s in irons. I mean at a disadvantage. Within ten minutes that woman had tears coursing down her cheeks. I don’t know whether it was my apologizing or whether she was laughing at me. Anyway it ended up with my taking her out to the movies. She had the cargo hooks in me fore and aft.

I tell you it was a narrow shave. Even now I don’t know how I escaped. But I got a room at a different place the very next day. I could see there were breakers ahead with that boarding-house keeper. Luckily she wasn’t there when the expressmen came for my ditty bag.

I have heard that a sailor has a girl in every port. Lots of sailors have. But by a girl is meant a sweetheart. And a sweetheart to a sailor doesn’t always mean what it means to other people. That sounds a little complicated. It is complicated. Women are the most complicated things in life.

I think my worst encounter with a woman happened at a house party I once attended. I suppose the host thought it would be fine to have a sea captain along; sort of give his party a touch of atmosphere. Several of the guests were yachtsmen and there was a big swimming pool in the back yard; so it might have been called a seafaring party, I suppose.

But I was all out of kilter there. The people were very rich and every time I turned around I bumped into a servant in livery. But I got through the dinner all right and was doing well with the evening—it was a nice moonlit, summer evening—when someone proposed that we all go swimming. I didn’t mind swimming but the suggestion was that we go swimming with all our clothes on. No doubt the wine had made my friends reckless. Being a teetotaler, I was not so enthusiastic at the idea.

Like most sailors I travel light. I had only one suit of clothes with me, one suit of underwear and one pair of shoes. So when that happy crew began to move towards the swimming pool with the idea of jumping in “all standing” I was faced with a problem.

I was puzzled as to whether I should turn around and run, or whether I should throw off some of my clothes and make the best of a bad bargain.

Just then two ladies took hold of my arm and began to propel me towards the pool. I back-watered hard. But there was no escape. I figured if I could only get my coat and pants off I would at least have some dry clothes to put on when I got out.

With a quick move I suddenly shook myself clear and peeled off my coat. Before they could grab me again I slipped out of my pants and started off on a run for the pool. It was about twenty yards away. There was a loud shout as I did so. At once several of the ladies came running for me and began to pull at my shirt. You would hardly think ladies would act like that even after a little wine. Before I knew it I was pretty nearly down to rock bottom so far as clothes went. Terribly embarrassed I dove in.

Of course there were loud cheers when I came up. I refused to get out of the pool until my host brought me an overcoat.

Experiences like that make a seafaring man glad to get to sea again.

I could go on for a long time telling about my experiences with women; some of them good, some bad; some funny and some tragic. Naturally these experiences have brought me to pretty definite conclusions about the fair sex.

One of these conclusions is that while they may be fair in the sense of looks, they aren’t in the sense of justice. An old lady once exclaimed to me:

“Why, Captain, you have the cleanest hands!”

“Well, why shouldn’t they be clean, madam?” said I.

She giggled foolishly. “Oh, because you are a sea captain.”

You see she just had a deep conviction that all sea captains had dirty hands; and probably nothing in the world would shake that unfair prejudice out of her.

On the other hand I think most women are braver than men; certainly they are more plucky. I have heard many a man whine; I’ve never heard a normal healthy woman in her right mind whine.

I like a woman’s judgment, too. Old as I am, and I’m old enough to be a grandfather, had I shipped a wife in youth, I still write and consult my mother’s judgment if I possibly can before making any important decision.

I like a woman’s temperance and moderation. This may seem a funny thing to say when there’s so much outcry against the modern flapper and dissipated young married woman. But I don’t believe all this truck. Let the young things be gay and the brides be free—so long as they are decent. And when you come to heave your sounding lead among the two sexes you’ll find it’s the women far more than the men that have kept to the deep safe channels of health and good citizenship.

Good women are the best company in the world: this from a confirmed old bachelor, too.

Pound for pound, thought for thought, a competent woman will work even with the best of men.

A woman is more constant in every way; more consistent, too, if you don’t go and upset her with emotions we men don’t understand.

Woman’s home-keeping instinct is the sailor’s salvation; maybe it’s the world’s too.

If women are bad luck at sea, they’re equally good luck on the beach.

I am sorry I have never married. This has been my greatest loss in life; but then it’s also probably been some poor woman’s gain.

CHAPTER II A MANGY LION

A life of adventure takes on a queer shape towards its finish—that is, unless a man be rich and can fashion its shape to his heart’s desire.

I was in the Explorers Club of New York not long ago when a friend of mine came in accompanied by another gentleman. My friend introduced his companion and then, excusing himself, left. I was struck by the eagerness with which the companion plied me with questions:

“My, you fellows are lucky who can go exploring!” he exclaimed.

“Yes,” said I. “It’s all right while you’re exploring. You get used to rotten meat, frozen fingers, lice and dirt. The hard times come when you get back.”

He looked surprised. He was a business man and probably had spent his entire life since college moored to a desk.

“But I thought that was the finest part of it all. Don’t you go to banquets, lecture, write stories and get interviewed a lot?”

“Yes, we do.”

“And aren’t you always more or less preparing for the next voyage, looking up a ship and gathering supplies together and that sort of thing?”

“Yes, that’s true, too.”

“And don’t people make a lot of you? I mean to say, isn’t an explorer something of a social lion?”

I had to laugh at that. And right away I had to agree, because there was some truth in what the fellow said. But I couldn’t give him the whole truth without revealing a good many private matters that I have never spoken of until I penned these lines.

I was just a young fellow when I got back from Peary’s polar trip. I had lived a seafaring hard life and had never known what a real luxury was. So I was pretty much set up when under Peary’s guidance I got myself a suit of evening clothes and sat down to ten-course dinners with a lot of great men. At first it was like going to a circus. And the figure of speech that calls the guest of honor a lion proved to be an accurate one. For the guests of honor are animals that everybody comes to look at.

Curiously enough I didn’t discover I was a lion until after about ten years of it. Then it began to dawn on me that the smiles and cordiality passed out were not always genuine. It was come-along stuff. People who wanted me to do my tricks, so to speak.

Dr. Knud Rasmussen and Captain Bartlett on theMorrissey.

I didn’t have any real tricks, any more than old Silver King did. He was the big polar bear I brought back in 1910 after I’d taken Paul Rainey and Harry Whitney hunting in Greenland. I admit that sometimes when I got enthusiastic about the Eskimos or a little bit sore about the Cook-Peary business, I used to come out with language that wasn’t exactly refined. And when I got to describing the muck and gurry of a seal hunt I had to push the English tongue pretty hard to get the colors somewhere near the real picture; and once in a while I used to talk loud, sometimes when everybody else was piping down. You see, a man’s lungs get a bit powerful after bawling orders to windward against a gale. I shall always be more at home on a quarterdeck. I suppose I even waved my hands around sometimes. In other words I was “putting on a show.” I was a lion—an animal out of the zoo, too damn tame to bite anybody, but strange enough for people to enjoy looking at once in a while.

But all this didn’t come home to me until I got to be a mangy lion.

The trouble was I fell into a spell of drifting in the years after the war. I really ought to have been at sea. Thirty years on the ocean does not fit a man for a shore job. But there I was teetering on the fence, neither going to sea nor becoming established ashore. I had had too much exploring to get any kick out of a straight job of skippering; and the plans I had for flying to the North Pole or the South Pole somehow wouldn’t come to a head. I wasn’t getting anywhere. I wasn’t making any money. I am not sure that I was even making any friends.

Thus I can say perfectly frankly that I was just a mangy lion, a has-been who was being carted around to a free dinner here and there in hopes that he would break out into some rich sea tale and stage a freak monologue free of charge.

This is a delicate subject I am on, for I have so many good true friends that I wouldn’t for the world step on their toes or be ungrateful. But I have to admit that in those drifting years I gathered a wide circle of acquaintances who had only a passing and selfish interest in me.

I remember one big dinner I went to. It was in a private house. There were all men present, most of them millionaires. The host certainly put on a lot of dog. There were servants in livery standing all around. I felt as if I were at the President’s reception or something of the sort.

After about eight rounds of cocktails we sat down. As I was a teetotaler I was good and sober. Outwardly everybody else was sober too. But there was an exuberance about the crowd that was unmistakably artificial.

It was a good gang. They were lively and full of jokes and many of them good sportsmen. But I could see how the whole party was working around to me. The moment was bound to come when my host would, in effect, push me forward and nudge me in the back with, “Bartlett, do your stuff.”

As he had no doubt primed his guests they would all be waiting for the invisible signal and turn my way expecting me to put on a good show.

I tell you it was a pretty nasty feeling. I admit I was getting a good dinner in high class company. With my small bank account I couldn’t afford anything like it. But a wave of feeling came over me that I would much rather be starving in the street than play the part of a hired clown for a group of money masters.

Sure enough, when a lull in the conversation came, the host sang out:

“Well, Bob, how are you making out?”

“All right,” said I, “all right. Don’t I look all right?”

I didn’t recognize my own voice. It was flat and unfriendly. I heard somebody near me say, “Give him a drink; his has died on him.”

Before I could control my anger, I turned around and retorted sharply: “I don’t drink.”

“Gentlemen,” loudly announced the host, “you have here sitting before you the only he-man in the world who is a teetotaler!”

Cheers and applause mixed in with ribald remarks met this observation. I felt my neck get hot. My fingers itched to beat some of the sneering wine-flushed faces around me.

“Who got to the Pole?” shouted a thick voice across the table.

I didn’t even look up. I went right on eating although I couldn’t swallow. My food stuck in my throat.

The host made two or three other efforts to draw me out. But he failed. I had seen the light at last. I was just a mangy old lion and too old to be put through the hoop any more. I was ashamed to be rude and maybe snarl a little. But that was only human.

I was in too deep to stop all of a sudden. There were engagements that I couldn’t cancel. Also the true friends were mixed up with the false friends. To escape with dignity the trap into which I had blindly walked, was not easy.

One party I got into on false pretenses. I was told there weren’t going to be any strangers there. It was held in a fine big house that I loved and I knew I should have some conversation with a man I had admired for years, besides living for a few hours in the soothing atmosphere of the perfect luxury inherited money can buy.

Imagine my horror when I discovered my friend wasn’t going to be there at all! Instead, some of the younger people were having a dance. The guests weren’t all young; many were my age. But they weren’t my kind.

As usual there was a lot to drink and the party got rougher and rougher. I don’t set myself up to be any saint, but I certainly didn’t belong there. I tried to sneak away soon after midnight.

Just to show that I am not a prude I will tell about one night when a special friend of mine got started drinking and being foolish and I wouldn’t leave him. He was a man a little bit older than I was, too. He was worth a great many million dollars.

I followed him to a gambling club up in the fifties in New York. I went in with him just as sober as I am right now. We checked our coats and were about to go in to where the tables were when he turned to me and said:

“Bob, I want you to keep some money for me.”

He shoved a roll of bills into my hand. He had only a second or two because I saw some of his friends coming the other side. I didn’t look at the money but jammed it down in my jeans only too glad to be of help.

I got home about three o’clock in the morning after a not altogether unamusing evening. While I was undressing I suddenly remembered the money. I reached in and pulled out the bills. Imagine my horror when I discovered that my friend had given me sixteen thousand dollar bills! I’d never seen so much money in my life. I was scared stiff. I locked the door and put the washstand against it. Ordinarily I sleep with all the windows open because I hate close air. That night I kept them all closed and latched. Next morning I felt just about as groggy from the frowst as my friend must have felt from his dissipation.

I steamed all through breakfast over the trick he had played on me. Then I had an inspiration. I would get even with him.

That afternoon I met him at his club.

“By the way, Bob,” he said, “didn’t I give you some money last night?”

“Look here,” I told him with affected irritation, “you’ve got to stop drinking. You didn’t give me any money. When a man gets all tanked up with liquor the way you did last night he doesn’t know what he does.”

“Gracious goodness!” he muttered. Those were his actual words. (Think of a man giving away $16,000, forgetting what he has done with it and using language as thin as that when he remembers about it!)

I strung him along for quite a while. Finally I gave him his sixteen thousand dollar bills. He wasn’t very excited after all. But then he was a millionaire. He tried to give me one of them, but I refused. Even a mangy lion sometimes knows whose hand to lick.

A rich friend took me down in the country a hundred miles or so from New York to spend the night with him. I stayed there a week. I found the people he invited were a friendly crowd and they were interested in outdoor things. I must say it was a pretty temperate party. Of course there was a good deal of drinking; there always was in pre-prohibition times. I suppose there is yet.

The thing that stuck in my mind about this party was the endurance people showed in exercising as well as in eating and drinking. I don’t mean children either; I mean people in their forties and fifties.

Yet one of them who was interested in the North said to me: “You must be made of iron to stand that life up there in the Arctic.”

“I have a good digestion,” I admitted.

“But doesn’t it wear you out to live on a raw meat and pemmican diet and drive a dog team for miles and miles every day?”

I agreed it was hard work.

“How long does it take you to get over it?”

“Depends on the trip,” said I. “Usually there isn’t any ‘getting over it’ as you call it.”

I didn’t tell my questioner that for three days I had been going through just as hard a life as I ever did in the Arctic. And I figured it was going to take me longer to get over the results of those three days of high-speed house party than any seven days I ever spent on the Polar Sea.

I mean that hardships are pretty much a matter of the point of view. After I have put in twenty hours eating rich food and talking to fat ladies and rushing about here and there without any particular plan I am just about exhausted. Before I know it I begin to have indigestion in my head as well as in my stomach. As for the fatigue of being polite every minute of the day to people that you don’t like, or never heard of before, I think that’s about the worst chore in the world. At the end of that party I admitted to my host I had had a fine time; and I did. But I had to recuperate. It was ten days more before I felt normal again.

The same sort of thing applies to my experiences downtown in New York. I mean down among the business men in what is known as the financial district. I have some fine friends there. They still ask me down to lunch once in a while and sometimes get me to sit in their offices while they do business. I always enjoy the adventure of it, same as any of them enjoy bear-hunting, I suppose.

But I swear it tires me just to sit and look at a modern business executive at work. I remember one man especially. He has three telephones on his desk and two secretaries. He’ll grab a telephone and say: “Hello! sure, what will you pay me?” And while the other fellow is answering him he’ll turn to his secretary and begin dictating a letter.

“That isn’t enough,” he’ll shout back into the telephone and reach for the other telephone that has just begun to ring.

“Make it dinner,” he’ll yell into the other telephone. And then come back to the first telephone and snap: “Add 5 per cent.”

I got so dizzy one afternoon watching him go through this acrobatic performance with those telephones and secretaries, and two or three people standing around and talking to him at the same time, that I had to go put my head out of the window. A seafaring life may be hard work but it never drives anybody crazy who isn’t crazy already. I’ll take my punishment in the Arctic any day.

Sometimes I have gone down to Wall Street actually on business. I remember the time I went to Hudson Bay in the steamship Algerine as mate and what came of it. On board we had a well-known rich man, Mr. Arthur Moore. He invited me to visit his office next time I came to New York.

So a year later I took my life in my hands, put my gold watch in an inside pocket and went down to Wall Street to see if I couldn’t get some financial backing for Admiral Peary who had been so kind to me.

I found Mr. Moore, Sr., and he gave me a letter to Mr. William Rockefeller, urging me at the same time to give up Arctic work and get a job in the Standard Oil. That sounded pretty heavy. I began to wish I were back on my ship. When I went to present the letter I stopped on the steps of 26 Broadway. I tossed up a coin, heads I go in, tails I don’t. It came tails. That afternoon I saw Mr. Jesup by appointment. He said to me: “As long as I live I’ll see Peary has enough money to work with.”

Altogether that was a bad day. I met a number of rich gentlemen and they were very courteous. But they seemed absorbed in their business. Finally it was all put up to Mr. Morris K. Jesup whether I got the money for Peary or not. I had to wait until five o’clock to know the answer.

Thinking of my mother and home and wishing I could see both I bought a newspaper and slipped into Trinity Church to rest my troubled mind. I sat down in one of the back pews and opened the paper, being careful not to make any noise, and began to read. It was a much more typical thing for a seafaring man to do than most people would realize.

Just about the time I was comfortable a loud voice said: “Get out of here! Why are you profaning God’s temple by reading a newspaper?” It was a shock and a surprise. My eyes may have been on the paper but my thoughts were never far from the Christian atmosphere in which I sat.

I looked up at the vestryman but his face was hard. The Devil must have laughed as I turned red and went out.

That night Mr. Jesup gave me the good news that he was going to help. But as I started to say, I do not feel that he or any of the other big men had worries any greater than a fishing Captain can have.

Right in the past year I spent $2,000 to fit out for a cod-fishing trip in the steamer Viking. Down east I took on about 200,000 pounds of green codfish and had them dried for Mediterranean trade. When I got back I had to sell them at a low price because the market was off. I had to pay my crew $1,600. This left me without any money and I still owed $2,600. If some of those fine gentlemen I met in New York were up against a thing like this, with every penny of their capital sewn up tighter than a drum, they would know what real worry is.

CHAPTER III THE SEA IS A HARD MASTER

The early years of my life were spent with my father and uncles in the Newfoundland sealing fleet. Then I got into the banana trade, mostly in the West Indies, from which I was graduated to command of a full-fledged ocean tramp steamer, sailing to all oceans of the globe. For the past thirty years I have been going to the polar regions, with some sealing between expeditions. I was master of Peary’s North Pole ship, the Roosevelt, and I commanded a troop transport during the war, when I held rank in the United States Naval Reserve. At no time since my boyhood have I been for over a month on the beach save whilst recovering from one voyage or preparing for another.

I was born in the little village of Brigus, on Conception Bay, Newfoundland, the 15th of August, 1875, where for one hundred and fifty years my forebears have lived. The Bartletts of Brigus have always been seafaring people. When Thomas Jefferson was President of the United States, the Bartletts were cod fishers on the Banks and down to Labrador.

My people came originally from the west coast of England, Devon and Dorset. On my father’s side they were big-boned folk, very dark in complexion and with coarse black hair. These are still sometimes called the “Black Bartletts of Brigus,” and the reason of it goes clear back to Drake’s day.

In 1588 the Spanish Armada, with the flower of Spain on board, cruised north to make all England Spanish. But by one of the overrulings of fate a great storm arose and the proud fleet was dashed to pieces on the rock-ribbed coast of western England and Scotland, from Land’s End to John o’ Groats.

From these ships hundreds of Spanish soldiers and sailors were washed ashore, dead and alive. Many were so well treated by the coast folk that there they stayed. Thus came to the Nordic Bartletts a strain of somber Spanish blood, accounting not only for their complexion and their hair but, some say, for the independence and the airs still found among them.

These castaways from the Spanish ships found happiness and contentment for a time. The beautiful English girls, coupled with luscious Devonshire cream and a countryside of rare loveliness, held them for a while. But a roving spirit seldom stills. The newcomers began to look, not north, but west; and many, including my forebears, set forth.

My people reached Newfoundland at Brigus and settled there. The hard stern coast no doubt reminded them of their native heath: the surrounding country of woods, streams, downs and hills was not unlike bleak western England. Mostly in the old country they had been fishermen and sailors. Now in the new land they soon found cod, salmon, and seals in plenty. Yet it was a hard place in which to settle down. The weather was unfriendly; the seasons short. But in Newfoundland, at least, the pioneers were monarchs of all they surveyed. Timber was there to build boats; and enough soil for small gardens, though not so productive as that of the old country. They came to stay, and stay they did.

In the earlier days the first settlers lived right on the shore. They depended chiefly on the sea, catching cod and seal in tiny boats. But as they prospered and began to understand conditions in the new country, they built larger boats so that they could go off shore.

In the year 1800 old Billy Bartlett built a boat large enough so that he could go off shore and meet the great spring migrations of seals as they came down from the Far North in March and April to whelp off the Newfoundland and Labrador coasts. Billy Bartlett’s watchword was “Follow on”; and to this day he is known as “Follow On Bartlett.” Follow on he did, going away up the Labrador coast in his little shallop (for that’s all she was) and returning back to Brigus loaded down to the gunwales with skins and blubber of seals.