Adrift in the Ice-Fields

Adrift in the Ice-Fields, by
Charles W. Hall

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Title: Adrift in the Ice-Fields
Author: Charles W. Hall
Release Date: May 25, 2007 [EBook #21607]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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[Illustration: ADRIFT. Page 162.]

ADRIFT IN THE ICE-FIELDS.
BY
CAPT. CHARLES W. HALL, AUTHOR OF "THE GREAT
BONANZA," ETC.
ILLUSTRATED.
BOSTON: LEE AND SHEPARD, PUBLISHERS. NEW YORK:
CHARLES T. DILLINGHAM. 1877.

COPYRIGHT: BY LEE AND SHEPHARD. 1877.

PREFACE.
To open to the youth of America a knowledge of some of the winter
sports of our neighbors of the maritime provinces, with their attendant
pleasures, perils, successes, and reverses, the following tale has been
written.
It does not claim to teach any great moral lesson, or even to be a guide
to the young sportsman; but the habits of all birds and animals treated
of here have been carefully studied, and, with the mode of their capture,
have been truthfully described.
It attempts to chronicle the adventures and misadventures of a party of
English gentlemen, during the early spring, while shooting sea-fowl on
the sea-ice by day, together with the stories with which they whiled
away the long evenings, each of which is intended to illustrate some
peculiar dialect or curious feature of the social life of our colonial
neighbors.
Later in the season the breaking up of the ice carries four hunters into
involuntary wandering, amid the vast ice-pack which in winter fills the
great Gulf of St. Lawrence. Their perils, the shifts to which they are

driven to procure shelter, food, fire, medicine, and other necessaries,
together with their devious drift and final rescue by a sealer, are used to
give interest to what is believed to be a reliable description of the
ice-fields of the Gulf, the habits of the seal, and life on board of a
sealing steamer.
It would seem that the world had been ransacked to provide stories of
adventure for the boys of America; but within the region between the
Straits of Canso and the shores of Hudson's Bay there still lie hundreds
of leagues of land never trodden by the white man's foot; and the
folk-lore and idiosyncrasies of the population of the Lower Provinces
are almost as unknown to us, their near neighbors.
The descendants of emigrants from Bretagne, Picardy, Normandy, and
Poitou, still retaining much of their ancient patois, costume, habits, and
superstitions; the hardy Gael, still ignorant of any but the language of
Ossian and his burr-tongued Lowland neighbors; the people of each of
Ireland's many counties, clinging still to feud, fun, and their ancient
Erse tongue, together with representatives from every English shire,
and the remnants of Indian tribes and Esquimaux hordes,--offer an
opportunity for study of the differences of race, full of picturesque
interest, and scarcely to be met with elsewhere.
The century which has with us almost realized the apostolic
announcement, "Old things are passed away; behold, all things have
become new," with them has witnessed little more than the birth,
existence, and death of so many generations, and the old feuds and
prejudices of race and religion, little softened by the lapse of time, still
remain with their appropriate developments, in the social life of the
scattered peoples of these northern shores.
Regretting that the will to depict those life-pictures has not been better
seconded by more skill in word-painting, the author lays down his pen,
hoping that the pencil of the artist will atone, in some degree, for his
own "many short-comings."

CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. OUR COMPANY 9
II. BUILDING THE ICE-HOUSES.--MATTHEW COLLINS'S
GHOST 19
III. THE SILVER THAW.--A FOX HUNT.--ANTHONY
WORRELL'S DOG 55
IV. THE GRAND FLIGHT.--A GOOD STRATAGEM.--THE
PACKET LIGHT 75
V. A MAD SPORTSMAN.--SNOW-BLIND.--A NIGHT OF PERIL
95
VI. ADDITIONS TO THE PARTY.--AN INDIAN OUTFIT.--A
CONTESTED ELECTION 110
VII. A CHANGE IN THE WEATHER.--BREAKING UP OF THE
ICE.--JIM MOUNTAIN'S FIGHT WITH THE DEVIL 136
VIII. FLOAT-SHOOTING.--A GENERAL FIELD-DAY.--CHANGES
OF THE ICE 148
IX. ADRIFT 158
X. THE COUNCIL.--PASSING THE CAPE 169
XI. TAKING AN INVENTORY.--SETTING UP THE STOVE 175
XII. DOCTORING UNDER DIFFICULTIES.--AN ANXIOUS
NIGHT.--FROZEN UP 187
XIII. THE CHAPEL BELL.--THE FIRST SEAL.--THE NORTH
CAPE.--A SNOW-SQUALL 199

XIV. THE PACK OPENS.--MYSTERIOUS MURMURS.--LOVE
SCENES AND SOUNDS 207
XV. A SAIL.--THE SEALING GROUNDS.--THE ESQUIMAUX
LAMP.--AN