Now, take that first book on my travel shelf. It is Knight's "Cruise of the Falcon6." Nature was guilty of the pun which put this soul into a body so named. Read this simple record and tell me if there is anything in Hakluyt more wonderful. Two landsmen—solicitors, if I remember right—go down to Southampton Quay7. They pick up a long-shore youth, and they embark8 in a tiny boat in which they put to sea. Where do they turn up? At Buenos Ayres. Thence they penetrate9 to Paraquay, return to the West Indies, sell their little boat there, and so home. What could the Elizabethan mariners10 have done more? There are no Spanish galleons11 now to vary the monotony of such a voyage, but had there been I am very certain our adventurers would have had their share of the doubloons. But surely it was the nobler when done out of the pure lust12 of adventure and in answer to the call of the sea, with no golden bait to draw them on. The old spirit still lives, disguise it as you will with top hats, frock coats, and all prosaic13 settings. Perhaps even they also will seem romantic when centuries have blurred14 them.
Another book which shows the romance and the heroism15 which still linger upon earth is that large copy of the "Voyage of the Discovery in the Antarctic" by Captain Scott. Written in plain sailor fashion with no attempt at over-statement or colour, it none the less (or perhaps all the more) leaves a deep impression upon the mind. As one reads it, and reflects on what one reads, one seems to get a clear view of just those qualities which make the best kind of Briton. Every nation produces brave men. Every nation has men of energy. But there is a certain type which mixes its bravery and its energy with a gentle modesty16 and a boyish good-humour, and it is just this type which is the highest. Here the whole expedition seem to have been imbued17 with the spirit of their commander. No flinching18, no grumbling19, every discomfort20 taken as a jest, no thought of self, each working only for the success of the enterprise. When you have read of such privations so endured and so chronicled, it makes one ashamed to show emotion over the small annoyances21 of daily life. Read of Scott's blinded, scurvy22-struck party staggering on to their goal, and then complain, if you can, of the heat of a northern sun, or the dust of a country road.
That is one of the weaknesses of modern life. We complain too much. We are not ashamed of complaining. Time was when it was otherwise—when it was thought effeminate to complain. The Gentleman should always be the Stoic23, with his soul too great to be affected24 by the small troubles of life. "You look cold, sir," said an English sympathizer to a French emigre. The fallen noble drew himself up in his threadbare coat. "Sir," said he, "a gentleman is never cold." One's consideration for others as well as one's own self-respect should check the grumble25. This self-suppression, and also the concealment26 of pain are two of the old noblesse oblige characteristics which are now little more than a tradition. Public opinion should be firmer on the matter. The man who must hop27 because his shin is hacked28, or wring29 his hand because his knuckles30 are bruised31 should be made to feel that he is an object not of pity, but of contempt.
The tradition of Arctic exploration is a noble one among Americans as well as ourselves. The next book is a case in point. It is Greely's "Arctic Service," and it is a worthy32 shelf-companion to Scott's "Account of the Voyage of the Discovery." There are incidents in this book which one can never forget. The episode of those twenty-odd men lying upon that horrible bluff33, and dying one a day from cold and hunger and scurvy, is one which dwarfs34 all our puny35 tragedies of romance. And the gallant36 starving leader giving lectures on abstract science in an attempt to take the thoughts of the dying men away from their sufferings—what a picture! It is bad to suffer from cold and bad to suffer from hunger, and bad to live in the dark; but that men could do all these things for six months on end, and that some should live to tell the tale, is, indeed, a marvel37. What a world of feeling lies in the exclamation38 of the poor dying lieutenant39: "Well, this is wretched," he groaned40, as he turned his face to the wall.
The Anglo-Celtic race has always run to individualism, and yet there is none which is capable of conceiving and carrying out a finer ideal of discipline. There is nothing in Roman or Grecian annals, not even the lava-baked sentry41 at Pompeii, which gives a more sternly fine object-lesson in duty than the young recruits of the British army who went down in their ranks on the Birkenhead. And this expedition of Greely's gave rise to another example which seems to me hardly less remarkable42. You may remember, if you have read the book, that even when there were only about eight unfortunates still left, hardly able to move for weakness and hunger, the seven took the odd man out upon the ice, and shot him dead for breach43 of discipline. The whole grim proceeding44 was carried out with as much method and signing of papers, as if they were all within sight of the Capitol at Washington. His offence had consisted, so far as I can remember, of stealing and eating the thong45 which bound two portions of the sledge46 together, something about as appetizing as a bootlace. It is only fair to the commander to say, however, that it was one of a series of petty thefts, and that the thong of a sledge might mean life or death to the whole party.
Personally I must confess that anything bearing upon the Arctic Seas is always of the deepest interest to me. He who has once been within the borders of that mysterious region, which can be both the most lovely and the most repellent upon earth, must always retain something of its glamour47. Standing48 on the confines of known geography I have shot the southward flying ducks, and have taken from their gizzards pebbles49 which they have swallowed in some land whose shores no human foot has trod. The memory of that inexpressible air, of the great ice-girt lakes of deep blue water, of the cloudless sky shading away into a light green and then into a cold yellow at the horizon, of the noisy companionable birds, of the huge, greasy51-backed water animals, of the slug-like seals, startlingly black against the dazzling whiteness of the ice—all of it will come back to a man in his dreams, and will seem little more than some fantastic dream itself, go removed is it from the main stream of his life. And then to play a fish a hundred tons in weight, and worth two thousand pounds—but what in the world has all this to do with my bookcase?
Yet it has its place in my main line of thought, for it leads me straight to the very next upon the shelf, Bullen's "Cruise of the Cachelot," a book which is full of the glamour and the mystery of the sea, marred52 only by the brutality53 of those who go down to it in ships. This is the sperm-whale fishing, an open-sea affair, and very different from that Greenland ice groping in which I served a seven-months' apprenticeship54. Both, I fear, are things of the past—certainly the northern fishing is so, for why should men risk their lives to get oil when one has but to sink a pipe in the ground. It is the more fortunate then that it should have been handled by one of the most
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