Page:The Last Voyage of the Karluk, 1916.djvu/21



CHAPTER I

THE EXPEDITION AND ITS OBJECTS

We did not all come back.

Fifteen months after the Karluk, flagship of Vilhjalmar Stefansson's Canadian Arctic Expedition, steamed out of the navy yard at Esquimault, British Columbia, the United States revenue cutter, Bear, that perennial Good Samaritan of the Arctic, which thirty years before had been one of the ships to rescue the survivors of the Greely Expedition from Cape Sabine, brought nine of us back again to Esquimault—nine white men out of the twenty, who, with two Eskimo men, an Eskimo woman and her two little girls—and a black cat—comprised the ship's company when she began her westward drift along the northern coast of Alaska on the twenty-third of September, 1913. Years of sealing in the waters about Newfoundland and of Arctic voyaging and ice-travel with Peary had given me a variety of experience to fall back 1