stefansson-wrangel-09-26-001-027

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22

the Cathedral choir he had no training, but he had listened to operas in big
cities and to native songs in every corner of the earth, and whatever he heard
he could reproduce, modified by his peculiar temperament and talents. He could
play a variety of wind and string instruments and carried an assortment of them
with him wherever he went.

And he went nearly everywhere. Besides sailing every sea, he had
been a tramp in Australia and, I think, in Africa. He had run away from ships
in tropical islands both of the East and West Indies. He had been an officer in
the navy of Chile and had “fought” as lieutenant on a Chinese ship in the Chinese-
Japanese War. When the United States sent its first revenue cutter to arctic
Herschel Island in the arctic just west of the mackenzie River in 1889 to determine whether that central rendezvous of the new
whalemen's paradise was American or Canadian territory, Hadley was a minor
officer on the ship. The island turned out to be well east of what had previously
been agreed upon as the international boundary. The Government of the United
States, therefore, lacked the power to regulate the rather turbulent whaler-
Eskimo metropolis, and Hadley sailed west beyond Point Barrow.

The Arctic pleased Hadley beyond every country. The next twenty-
five years he made occasional forays to San Francisco or England but wintered
in the Arctic more than twenty times, always whaling or trapping except for a
brief connection with the arctic coal mines near Cape Lisburne. No man whose
namd is found in reference books under the heading of "Polar Explorer" ever
spent half that much time beyond either of the polar circles. Franklin died
during his second winter and so did Scott. Shackleton spent three polar winters,
Bartlett four, Nansen four. Amundsen has eight winters to his credit and so has
Sverdrup. Peary spent nine winters in the Arctic. I have ten polar winters
behind me now, but my record was only half that when Hadley joined our expedition
in 1914.

Hadley's experience besides being more extensive than that of any

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