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23

so-called explorer was also in a way more varied, for he had been
there as a trader, whaler, naval officer, coal miner and (the last
four years) as an explorer. He had travelled on foot and by sledge
and in every variety of sea conveyance - skin-boat, wooden whale-
boat, sail ship and steamer. He had hunted and trapped on the
arctic lands; he had travelled on the landfast sea ice and to some
extent on the moving pack. On one occasion he and his party had
been given up for dead when a terrific gale broke the ice on which
they were whaling west of Point Barrow and carried them they knew
not where, for they had no instruments of precision. When they
sighted land after several weeks of struggle, it was four hundred
miles from Point Barrow and about equally far from where they had
supposed themselves to be.

As related in "My Life With the Eskimo", I first met
Hadley at Cape Smythe, near Point Barrow, in 1908, and liked and
admired him from the first. When the three ships of my expedition
sailed past Cape Smythe in 1913, he was there and wanted to ioin
both because we had always been good friends and because he was be-
ginning to consider the north tip of Alaska a little tame. I
wanted to give him one of the chief positions of responsibility in
the expedition but, since it had been organized before I knew he
would join it, I found no berth for him at once, and without official
rating, he was sharing my cabin on board the Karluk as my friend
and travelling companion when an accident (see Chapter VI, "the

Friendly Arctic”) separated five other men and myself from-the
Karluk, which drifted off held fast in the shiftipg ice while we
watched from shore helpless. The ship was now under my official
next in command, Captain Robert A. Bartlett, and Hadley remained
without formal status as the sole occupant of my cabin during a

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