Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/77

Rh when a steam yacht with the pennant of the New York Yacht Club at its peak appeared from the southwest.

The yacht—the Inca, owned by Howard Bradley of New York—was known in as many harbours of the world as any other ship sailing purely for pleasure. Her owner and his wife had taken the vessel to visit at least one port of every country with a sea coast; her keel had scraped the bars of a hundred tropical rivers, and a score of times she had scurried for shelter into the basins of equatorial atolls.

Lands to the north too were known to her—the Faroes, Iceland, Tromso; and she had come to this same Greenland coast four years before, when Bradley and his wife had been hosts to half the Aurora party as far as Julianehaab, as now they were entertaining on board four of those who were to go into the Arctic on the newly chartered Viborg.

These four—Margaret Sherwood and her brother, with Price Latham and Dr. Otto Koehler—now stood with their hosts at the bow of the yacht while Bradley pointed out the little islets and the fiords of the rugged,