Adrift in the Ice-Fields.
Adrift.
Page 162.
BY
CAPT. CHARLES W. HALL,
AUTHOR OF "THE GREAT BONANZA," ETC.
ILLUSTRATED.
Copyright:
By LEE AND SHEPHARD.
1877.
PREFACE.
To open to the youth of America a knowledge of some of the winter sportsof our neighbors of the maritime provinces, with their attendantpleasures, perils, successes, and reverses, the following tale has beenwritten.
It does not claim to teach any great moral lesson, or even to be a guideto the young sportsman; but the habits of all birds and animals treatedof here have been carefully studied, and, with the mode of theircapture, have been truthfully described.
It attempts to chronicle the adventures and misadventures of a party ofEnglish gentlemen, during the early spring, while shooting sea-fowl onthe sea-ice by day, together with the stories with which they whiledaway the long evenings, each of which is intended to illustrate somepeculiar dialect or curious feature of the social life of our colonialneighbors.
Later in the season the breaking up of the ice carries four hunters intoinvoluntary wandering, amid the vast ice-pack which in winter fills thegreat Gulf of St. Lawrence. Their perils, the shifts to which they aredriven to procure shelter, food, fire, medicine, and other necessaries,together with their devious drift and final rescue by a sealer, are usedto give interest to what is believed to be a reliable description of theice-fields of the Gulf, the habits of the seal, and life on board of asealing steamer.[Pg 4]
It would seem that the world had been ransacked to provide stories ofadventure for the boys of America; but within the region between theStraits of Canso and the shores of Hudson's Bay there still lie hundredsof leagues of land never trodden by the white man's foot; and thefolk-lore and idiosyncrasies of the population of the Lower Provincesare almost as unknown to us, their near neighbors.
The descendants of emigrants from Bretagne, Picardy, Normandy, andPoitou, still retaining much of their ancient patois, costume, habits,and superstitions; the hardy Gael, still ignorant of any but thelanguage of Ossian and his burr-tongued Lowland neighbors; the people ofeach of Ireland's many counties, clinging still to feud, fun, and theirancient Erse tongue, together with representatives from every Englishshire, and the remnants of Indian tribes and Esquimaux hordes,—offer anopportunity for study of the differences of race, full of picturesqueinterest, and scarcely to be met with elsewhere.
The century which has with us almost realized the apostolicannouncement, "Old things are passed away; behold, all things havebecome new," with them has witnessed little more than the birth,existence, and death of so many generations, and the old feuds andprejudices of race and religion, little softened by the lapse of time,still remain with their appropr