North America here, in profound and lasting loneliness, dips its shaggy
arms and ice-bound capes into an ocean illuminated now by the brief
smile of summer but, for ten months out of the twelve, drear and utterly
desolate. The most striking features of the off-shore islands is that
they are islands of ice rather than of earth. Slightly rising above
ocean-level, they exhibit one or two feet of sandy soil, and between
this scant counterpane and the interior foundations of the earth is
nothing but pure translucent ice. There is going on a rapid
disintegrating of these islands. The whaler calls this far fringe of
America "the ocean graveyard" and "the step-mother to ships." There have
been five wrecks on this coast in recent years: the _Penelope_ off
Shingle Point, the _Bonanza_ off King Point, the _Triton_ on the shores
of Herschel itself, the _Alexander_ near Horton River, a little
missionary craft off Shingle Point, and Mikklesen's ship _The Duchess of
Bedford_, abandoning her ambitious search for a dream-continent in
Beaufort Sea to deposit her tapped-camphor-wood bones on the edge of the
ocean of her quest.
The Mackenzie River carries the freshening influence of its current for
miles out to sea, and the whole mainland coast is piled high with
drift-trees carried by its stream to the Eskimo,--a boon more prized by
them than the most seductive story the missionary can tell of the harps
and golden streets of that strange heaven of the white man where
whale-meat is unknown and blubber enters not.
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