Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/96

82 finding of any message would control the later movements of the relief party.

In the year in which the Aurora went up ice conditions were such as to give fair channels; but during the later seasons the whalers who had been attracted by rewards for finding Thomas or Hedon had met impassable barriers of ice two hundred miles short of the island and had turned back

The smallness of the Viborg, however, promised it favours from the ice such as the little Aurora had found in fighting its way up through narrow, closing channels. And those handling the Viborg were men to get a ship through where any hull could squeeze.

The ship's people, besides the three in the forward cabins, were five. In the first cabin aft now was Captain Jeremiah McNeal, bluff, able, stubborn, sincere, forty years old and without wife or bairn. He had shipped before the mast of a Scotch whaler at the age of eighteen, and had spent just sixteen of the intervening twenty-two years of his life within the Arctic Circle. He was a short, square, stocky man, smooth shaven as are most who live long