Chapter I: “and Now,” He Said, “’tis Do or Die”

It is true enough that Captain Mayne Brace was only a simple sailor. But if his heart was kind and soft, it was also a brave one. Nor did he lack genuine business habits, and long before the _Walrus_ reached the most northerly of the Shetland Islands, he had made up his mind as to what he should do.

He was returning a clean ship. As a clean ship he had to meet his owners. He knew what that would mean. There would be no banquets in his honour at the end of this voyage, as there had been last time when he returned to Hull a bumper ship, with thousands of tons of oil below, with bings of skins on deck even, and bergs of fresh-water ice heaped ’twixt main and fore, enough to gladden the eyes of every hotel-keeper in the City, and with a lovely young Polar bear as a gift to the Lady Mayoress. No wishing him further health and fortune, no men to carry him shoulder-high to the dining-hall. _Sic transit gloria mundi_ when a Greenland captain returns a clean ship, to meet with cold looks and taunts and sneers.

Honest Mayne Brace was not sure that he could face all this, so he put boldly into Lerwick, and let go the anchor opposite this quaint old town.

Everybody wanted a rest anyhow. Ingomar himself was longing to stretch his legs on shore, and the boys to ride madly over the moors on untrained and untameable Shetland ponies.

I believe the brave Yak-Yak men, with their thirty beautiful but daft dogs, and Slap-dash, with his four bears, would have all gone on shore together if invited, and taken the town by storm.

But Brace himself, with the young millionaire, went on shore, and took immediate possession of the telegraph office.

Every one knew good Brace, and lifted his hat to him, and welcomed him back from the land of ice and snow, and would fain have stopped him to chat, but he went hurrying on.

The postmaster himself shook hands effusively, and to him Brace was obliged to talk for a few minutes.

“I want you, Mr. Bryan, to let myself and my young friend here, in your presence of course, wire for a short time. It is on secret business of the greatest importance, and you know, Bryan, I am an adept at working the wires.”

The postmaster was pleased, delighted, he said; and down sat Brace, Ingomar standing by and looking amused.

The Arctic skipper summoned his owners at the Hull end, and requested them to wire him, through the medium of a confidential clerk.

When all was ready, he told them briefly the story of his misadventures, and asked for advice.

The reply was somewhat as follows, when boiled down.

“Curses on your ill luck! But why did you not obey our secret instructions?”

“Hadn’t the heart nor the conscience.” Thus the reply. “Requires more nerve than I have to do a thing of that kind. Would rather not stand in a felon’s dock.”

“You’re a fool.” This from Hull. “You have all but ruined your owners. We must sell the _Walrus_ now, and at once.”

Well, this was just the kind of message Brace half expected. And, when he read it, he burst into a joyous, hearty “Ha, ha, ha!” in which Ingomar readily joined.

Had this been the telephone, they might easily have heard that laugh at Hull. But a laugh that is merely wired is a very cold kind of an article.

“There is a gentleman,” wired Brace, “whom I know, that wants a strongly built craft to cruise around Tierra del Fuego. He is in Lerwick now, and might be tempted to buy the _Walrus_, at a price.”

“Tempt him, then, and be hanged to you,” was clicked through.

The return clicking spelt out, “He will give two-thirds of original price, if you will dock the ship for complete repairs at Hull.”

There was a long pause now. A consultation was being held. That was evident.

Then the wire rattled off, “A bargain! We will confirm our telegram by letter to-night. Good-bye, Brace, till we see you.”

“Good-bye, owners. Trust no ill feeling. Will lie here a week.”

Then Brace got up, and Ingomar and he shook hands.

“I have a great respect for you, Captain Brace,” said Ingomar. “To look at your jolly British face, I would not have credited you with such thorough business tact and judgment. Why, it is downright Americano!”

“Thank you; and now we’ll go and dine.”

“One minute, my friend. Who should my banker be in London? Thanks. Well, I’ll write a line to mine in New York, and they’ll soon make business straight for us in old England. Ah! my dear old father will know I’ve turned up again, and that my pride is softened will be shown by the fact that I am drawing on my pile for £200,000. I’m like the Germans, sir. There is no use going to war unless you’ve got the sinews and nerve, and we are going to war with the Antarctic Pole. There is nothing to be done without cash in this world.”

Brace’s first mate, with Charlie and Walt, came on shore soon, and all repaired to the chief hotel, and no schoolboys could have enjoyed “a blow-out” more thoroughly than these five enjoyed their first dinner on land, after so long and so dreary a time in Arctic seas.

For one of the chief pleasures in a sailor’s life lies in the getting back to the bonnie green shores of Britain again, after months or years of sailing on far-off foreign seas.

It was the sweet summer time now in the Shetland Isles, and our young folks enjoyed themselves as only young folks can.

They went fishing from boats and from the rocks, which are everywhere most fantastic and lovely, forming many a little lonely cave, where, on the golden sand, bask seals in blinks of sunshine.

The sea in spring and summer is nearly always blue, the breezes are balmy and bracing, and the uplands and inlands all carpeted o’er with the rarest and prettiest of wild flowers. Wild birds, too, are here, especially sea-birds, whose happy voices mingle musically with the song of the waves.

But I think that Charlie and Walt enjoyed more than anything else the bare-back rides they had on daft and droll little Shetland ponies, with Nick and his Nora doing their best to keep up with them, which they could only do by taking all kinds of cross-cuts, and meeting their masters where least expected.

I think it was a happy thought of Ingomar’s to buy and take off with them two of those ponies to assist the work of Antarctic exploration.

But come to think of it, when, weeks after this, the _Walrus_, now the property of young Ingomar, steamed into Hull, she was more of a floating menagerie than anything else.

The owners were less sulky than Brace had expected. They really did give a dinner, not only to the captain and his officers, but to all hands as well; and one of them, in a hearty speech, said, among other complimentary things, that he was sure he but expressed the sentiments of his colleagues when he told Captain Mayne Brace, whose services they were all too soon to lose, that a more clever, genial, or braver officer never steered a barque to the Polar seas. He hoped that all would join him in drinking his health, and wishing him success and safety all along on the venturesome voyage he was about to embark upon.

And all did.

* * * * *

It took the whole of the autumn and winter to build and fit out the new Arctic explorer _Sea Elephant_, for the _Walrus_ was going to act more as store-ship and tender to the _Sea Elephant_ than anything else. She was to be under the command of Captain Mayne Brace himself, and would take out the Yak-Yaks, the bears, and dogs, as well as an extra supply of everything that was likely to be needed during the long and terrible voyage and journey into the regions of the Great Unknown.

Captain Mayne Brace knew well what these regions were, for he had himself taken part in a German expedition that had gone out many years before, and had noted the deficiencies thereof.

So it was he alone who superintended everything.

Though aided nobly by his mate, and even his old bo’s’n and his Arctic spectioneer, it was no easy task that he had set himself to perform. They were going to a great snow-clad continent, on which there are neither houses nor towns any more than there are in the moon, and everything in the shape of repairs to engines, to interior, or to any part or portion of the ship, must be done by the artificers, mechanics, and engineers whom he must carry.

Many a long month’s thought and calculation this gave him, and many a long journey also, to and fro in the train, for Dundee itself was to have the honour of building and fitting out the _Sea Elephant_.

Captain Mayne Brace had no children of his own. He used to say that he never could see any fun in a sailor marrying, who was here to-day and away to-morrow, bound for the back of Bellfuff--wherever that may be--with only a plank or two betwixt him and eternity, and liable any day or hour to have to make a sudden call at the door of Davy Jones’ Locker.

Ingomar quite agreed with him as to the inadvisability of leaving widows behind them to mourn their loss for the rest of their lives.

“Mourn for the rest of their lives? Eh? Humph!” That was Captain Brace’s reply. And proof enough, too, I think, that he was not likely to run the risk of wrecking his barque of life on the reefs and rocks of matrimony.

But Brace had been a saving man though no niggard, and therefore he did not begrudge taking Walt and Charlie with him, to see the beauties of bonnie Dundee whenever school terms permitted.

The companionship of such a man as Captain Brace was indeed a liberal education in itself for them. For even during their holidays he would never suffer them to be altogether idle, and he was, when time admitted, their tutor in everything pertaining to the working of a ship.

The Dundee shipbuilders were honest. They considered that their reputation was quite hung on gimbals with regard to the laying down and building

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of the _Sea Elephant_, especially under the supervision of such an officer as Captain Brace, who would not permit a plank, beam, or knee to be used that was not as sound as bronze.

The manning and officering of the _Sea Elephant_ was another matter for much thought.

She would be when finished about 700 tons, and would carry provisions for three whole years. Every pound or parcel of these would be from the best firms, and hermetically sealed with such care that there would be no danger of anything going wrong should it have to be kept for many years.

I cannot spare space to describe in detail all the articles of food and drink which the two vessels would carry between them, nor their armour. As to the latter, independently of ordinary rifles and ammunition, they had specially built tanks for explosives of tremendous power; and these, I may inform you, were so packed for safety that even if the ship was in flames above them, there could be no danger of catastrophe.

The uses these would be put to we shall see anon, but there was a skilled artificer in charge of them, a man of the name of Macdonald, who had worked in dynamite factories since his boyhood--a steady, sober, long-headed Scot, whose rating was to be Captain of Explosives (Captain X. he was called for short).

The _Sea Elephant_ was going to war, it is true, but it was war with Nature’s forces, for the age has at last come in which Man is master here below.

Ingomar was in constant and loving correspondence with his mother and sister. He wrote to his father, too, but told him nothing about his intention of disappearing from the civilized world for a time. All he said was, that he was embarking upon an honest though daring enterprise, which, he trusted, would, if he were successful, restore him once more to his father’s favour. If he succeeded, then, he would return, the prodigal son to his father’s house; if he failed, that father would never hear of him any more.

The captain of the _Sea Elephant_ was an officer of high repute in the United States Navy, who had seen service in the Polar regions. His name, Bell.

Mr. Curtis was second in command, and belonged to the British Royal Navy. He was a young fellow of barely six and twenty, and with all the dash and go your true-born Englishman and sailor always possesses. From the first he and Ingomar were the greatest friends.

The crew were all tried men, Arctic or icemen, as they are called--English, Scots, Finns, and Norwegians.

“Be good to mother,” was Ingomar’s very last postscript to Sissie. “Don’t believe me dead whatever you hear till thrice twelve months are past and gone.”

Poor Ingomar, he was nothing if not romantic!

They sailed, those two ships, both upon the same day from a port in the English Channel, but with so little fuss, and so little newspaper reporting, that hardly anybody save the nearest and dearest relatives of officers and crew witnessed their departure.

It was not until they were out and away leagues and leagues from the chalky cliffs of England, not indeed until the August sun had set, that Ingomar, as he stood on the quarter-deck of the sturdy _Walrus_, heaved a sigh of relief, and turned to shake hands with bold Mayne Brace.

“Thank God, captain,” he said, “the trouble, the worry, the fuss, is over at last. How soundly I shall sleep to-night!”

The skipper laughed as he rubbed his hands in glee.

“And now,” he said, “’tis do or die.”