Part 1

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_To_

My Parents.

_The_ Great White Way A Record of an Unusual Voyage of Discovery, and some Romantic Love Affairs amid Strange Surroundings. The Whole Recounted by one Nicholas Chase, Promoter of the Expedition, whose Reports have been Arranged for Publication by

ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE

_Author of “The Van Dwellers,” “The Bread Line,” etc._

WITH DRAWINGS BY BERNARD J. ROSENMEYER, SKETCHES BY CHAUNCEY GALE, AND MAPS, ETC. FROM MR. CHASE’S NOTE BOOK

New York J. F. TAYLOR & COMPANY 1901

COPYRIGHT, 1901, BY J. F. TAYLOR & CO.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Answer to an Old Summons 5

II. I Renew an Old Dream 7

III. Even Seeking to Realize It 11

IV. Turning to the Sea, at Last, for Solace 15

V. I Overhaul the Steam Yacht, Billowcrest 20

VI. Where All Things Become Possible 49

VII. I Learn the Way of the Sea, and Enter More Fully Into My Heritage 59

VIII. The Halcyon Way to the South 70

IX. Admonition and Counsel 76

X. Captain Biffer is Assisted by the Pampeiro 86

XI. In Gloomy Seas 95

XII. Where Captain Biffer Revises Some Opinions 99

XIII. In the “Fighting-Top” 106

XIV. An Excursion and an Experiment 115

XV. As Reported by My Note-Book 121

XVI. Following the Pacemaker 134

XVII. Investigation and Discovery 146

XVIII. A “Borning” and a Mystery 150

XIX. A Long Farewell 154

XX. The Long Dark 174

XXI. An Arrival and a Departure 183

XXII. On the Air-Line, South 190

XXIII. The Cloudcrest Makes a Landing 199

XXIV. The Great White Way 209

XXV. Where the Way Ends 215

XXVI. The Welcome to the Unknown 223

XXVII. The Prince of the Purple Fields 228

XXVIII. A Harbor of Forgotten Dreams 235

XXIX. A Land of the Heart’s Desire 243

XXX. The Lady of the Lilies 249

XXXI. The Pole at Last 253

XXXII. An Offering to the Sun 264

XXXIII. The Touch of Life 269

XXXIV. The Pardon of Love 279

XXXV. Down the River of Coming Dark 290

XXXVI. The “Passage of the Dead” 293

XXXVII. The Rising Tide 301

XXXVIII. Storm and Stress 305

XXXIX. Where Dreams Become Real 315

XL. Claiming the Reward 322

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

“The South Pole for us all!” (page 58) _Frontispiece_

“Then, somebody was clinging to me” Page 93

“From our high vantage we could command a vast circle of sunless, melancholy cold” Page 117

“Cut her, Nick, cut her! I can’t stick on any longer!” Page 202

THE PALACE OF THE PRINCE

“A harbor for vanished argosies and forgotten dreams” Page 242

THE PARDON OF LOVE

“There fell upon them a long golden bar of the returning sunlight” Page 288

DRAMATIS PERSONÆ _OF_ _THE_ GREAT WHITE WAY.

NICHOLAS CHASE, a young man with a dream of discovery, and an inherited love of the sea.

CHAUNCEY GALE, a merry millionaire, with a willingness to back his judgment.

EDITH GALE, his daughter, a girl with accomplishments and ideas.

ZAR, colored maid and former nurse of Edith Gale. A woman with no “fool notions” about the South Pole.

FERRATONI, an Italian electrician with wireless communication, and subtle psychic theories.

CAPTAIN JOSEPH BIFFER, Master of the Billowcrest. An old salt, with little respect for wild expeditions.

TERENCE LARKINS, First Officer of the Billowcrest, with a disregard of facts.

MR. EMORY, Second Officer of the Billowcrest.

WILLIAM STURRITT, Steward of the Billowcrest, and inventor of condensed food tablets.

FRENCHY, a bosun who stirs up trouble.

PRINCE OF THE PURPLE FIELDS, a gentle despot of the _Port of Dreams_.

PRINCESS OF THE LILIED HILLS, _His Serene Sister_, whose domain is the deepest South.

Three maidens of the _Land of Dreams and Lotus_.

A shipwrecked sailor, whose rescue is important to all concerned.

Cabin boy, stewardess, and crew of the Billowcrest.

Courtiers, populace, etc., of the _Land of the Sloping Sun_.

THE GREAT WHITE WAY.

I. ANSWER TO AN OLD SUMMONS.

For more than ten generations my maternal ancestors have been farers of the sea, and I was born within call of high tide. At the distance of a thousand miles inland it still called me, and often in childhood I woke at night from dreams of a blue harbor with white sails.

It is not strange, therefore, that I should return to the coast. When, at the age of thirty, I found myself happily rid of a commercial venture—conducted for ten years half-heartedly and with insignificant results—it was only natural that I should set my face seaward. My custom, of which there was never any great amount, and my goodwill, of which there was ever an abundance, I had disposed of to one who was likely to reverse these conditions—his methods in the matter of trade being rather less eccentric than my own. He had been able to pay me in cash the modest sum agreed upon, and this amount I now hoped to increase through some marine investment or adventure—something that would bring me at once into active sea life—though I do not now see what this could have been, and I confess that my ideas at the time were somewhat vague.

II. I RENEW AN OLD DREAM.

Perhaps first of all I wished to visit the South Pole—not an unreasonable ambition it would seem for one backed by ten generations of sea captains and ocean faring—but one that I found not altogether easy to gratify. For one thing, there was no Antarctic expedition forming at the time; and then, my notions in the matter were not popular.

From boyhood it had been my dream that about the earth’s southern axis, shut in by a precipitous wall of ice, there lay a great undiscovered world. Not a bleak desolation of storm-swept peaks and glaciers, but a fair, fruitful land, warmed and nourished from beneath by the great central heat brought nearer to the surface there through terrestrial oblation, or, as my geography had put it, the “flattening of the poles.”

I had held to this fancy for a long time on the basis of theory only, and, perhaps, the added premise that nature would not allow so vast a tract as the Antarctic Continent to lie desolate. But, curiously enough, about the time I arrived in New York I met with what seemed to me undoubted bits of evidence in the reports of some recent polar observations.

Borchgrevink, a Norwegian explorer, returning with a poorly fitted Antarctic expedition, reported, among other things, a warm current off Victoria Land, at a point below the 71st parallel, and flowing approximately from the _direction of the pole!_[1]

Footnote 1:

“It seems to me,” he says, in an article printed in the Century Magazine (January, 1896), “that an investigation of the origin and consequences of the warm current running northeast, which we experienced in Victoria Bay, is of the greatest importance.”

True, Borchgrevink believed the Antarctic Continent to be an exceptionally cold one, but for this he was not to blame. No man can help what he does or does not believe in these matters regardless of sound logic and able reasoning to the contrary.—N. C.

Nansen, another Norwegian, in the Arctic Polar Sea, had been astonished to find that the water at a great depth, instead of being colder than at the surface as he had expected, was _warmer_! He had also found that as he progressed northward from 80° the thermometer had been inclined to _rise_ rather than to fall. To be sure, when he arrived at a point within a little more than two hundred miles of the earth’s axis, he had found only a continuance of ice—a frozen sea which undoubtedly extended to the pole itself; but this frigidity I attributed to the fact that it _was_ a sea into which, from the zone of fierce cold below, were constantly forced huge ice-floes. These, as I conceived, would maintain the condition of cold in the Arctics by shutting out the under warmth, through which, however, they would be gradually melted—to be discharged in those great Arctic currents which Nansen and other explorers had observed. The lack of thickness in the ice _forming_ about the pole had also been noted with some surprise. This too, I claimed, was due to the warm earth beneath it which, while it could not much affect the general climate, when some three miles of very chilly water and several feet of substantial ice lay between, did serve as a provision of nature to prevent the northern sea from becoming one mighty solidified mass.

Now, ice-floes could not be forced inland, as would have to be the case in the Antarctics where there was admittedly a continent instead of a sea. Around this continent, it was said, there lay a precipitous frozen wall which no man had ever scaled. What lay beyond, no man of our world had ever seen. But in my fancy I saw those ramparts of eternal ice receding inward to a pleasant land, as the snow-capped Sierras slope to the verdant plains of California. A pleasant land—a fair circular world—temperate in its outer zone, becoming even tropic at the center, and extending no less than a thousand miles from rim to rim. There, I believed, unknown to the world without, a great and perhaps enlightened race lived and toiled—loved and died.

III. EVEN SEEKING TO REALIZE IT.

But scientists, I was grieved to find, took very little stock in these views. Even such as were willing to listen declared that the earth’s oblation counted for nothing. Most of them questioned the existence of a great central heat—some disputed it altogether. The currents and temperatures reported by Nansen, Borchgrevink and others, they ascribed, as nearly as I can remember, to centrifugal deflections, to gravitatory adjustments—to anything, in fact, rather than what seemed to me the simple and obvious causes. As a rule, they ridiculed the idea of a habitable world, or even the possibility of penetrating the continent at all. When I timidly referred to a plan I had partially conceived—something with balloons in it—they despised me so openly that I was grateful not to be dismissed with violence. I cannot forego one brief example.

He was a stout, shiny-coated man, with the round eyes and human expression of a seal. He took me quite seriously, however, which some of them had not. Also himself, and the world in general. When I had briefly stated my convictions he put his fingers together in front of his comfortable roundness and regarded me solemnly. Then he said:

“My dear young man, you are pursuing what science terms an _ignis fatuus_, commonly and vulgarly known as a will-o’-the-wisp. You are wasting your time, and I assure you that neither I nor my associates in science could, or would, indorse your sophistries, or even stand idly by and see you induce the unthinking man of means to invest in an undertaking which we, as men of profound research and calm understanding, could not, and therefore would not approve.” He cleared his throat with a phocine bark at the end of this period and settled himself for the next. “Men in all ages,” he proceeded, “have undertaken, in the cause of science, difficult tasks, and at vast expenditure, when there was a proper scientific basis for the effort.”

He paused again. My case was hopeless so far as he was concerned—that was clear. I would close the interview with a bit of pleasantry.

“Ah, yes,” I suggested, “such as the ‘hunting of the snark,’ for instance. Well, perhaps I shall find the snark at the South Pole, when I get there, who knows?”

The human seal lifted one flipper and scratched his head for a moment gravely. Then he said with great severity:

“Young man, I do not recall the _genus_ snark. I do not believe that science recognizes the existence of such a creature. Yet, even so, it is most unlikely that its habitat should be the South Pole.”

I retired then, strong in the conclusion that the imagination of the average scientist is a fixed equation, and his humor an unknown quantity. Also that his chief sphere of usefulness lies in being able to establish mathematically a fact already discovered by accident. The accident had not yet occurred, hence the time for the scientist and his arithmetic was not at hand.

I now sought capital without science, but the results though interesting were not gratifying.

A millionaire editor, a very Crœsus of journalism, was my final experience in this field. He didn’t have any time to throw away, but I seemed reasonably well-fed, and he saw I was in earnest, so he was willing to listen. He put his feet upon a table near me while he did it. When I got the bald facts out and was getting ready to amplify a little he broke in:

“How long would it take you to go there and get back?” he asked.

“I hardly know—five years, perhaps—possibly longer.”

The millionaire editor took his feet down.

“Humph! Hundred thousand dollars for a Sunday beat and five years to get it! No, I don’t think we want any South Poles in this paper——”

“But in the cause of human knowledge and science,” I argued.

“My friend,” he said, “the only human knowledge and science that I am interested in is the knowledge and science of getting out, next Sunday and the Sunday after, a better paper than that lantern-faced pirate down the street yonder. When you’ve found your South Pole and brought back a piece of it, come in, and I’ll pay you more for the first slice than anybody else, no matter what they offer. But you’re too long range for us just at present. Good day!”

IV. TURNING TO THE SEA, AT LAST, FOR SOLACE.

Having thus met only with rebuff and disaster in the places where it seemed to me I had most reason to expect welcome and encouragement, I turned for comfort to those who, like my forbears, went down to the sea in ships. Along South Street, where the sky shows through a tangle of rigging, and long bowsprits threaten to poke out windows across the way, I forgot my defeats and even, for a time, my purpose, as I revelled in my long-delayed heritage of the sea.

It was the ships from distant ports that fascinated me most. My Uncle Nicholas—a sailor who was more than half a poet—had been in the foreign trade. I remembered him dimly as a big brown-faced man who had told me of far lands and shipwrecks, and rocked me to sleep to the words and tune of an old hymn, of which I could still repeat the stanza beginning,

“The storm that wrecks the winter sky.”

His vessel with all on board had disappeared somewhere in the dark waters below Cape Horn more than twenty years before. I had inherited half of his name and a number of precious trinkets brought home during his early days of seafaring—also, it was supposed, something of his tastes and disposition. In a manner I was his heir, and the tall-masted, black-hulled barks that came in from the Orient—to be pushed as quietly into place at the dock as if they had but just been towed across the East River from Brooklyn—these, it seemed to me, were his ships, hence, _my_ ships that were coming in, at last.

I found in them treasures of joy unspeakable. Those from around the Horn seemed to bring me direct messages from the lost sailor. I felt that had he lived he would have believed in my dreams and helped me to make them reality. At times I even went so far as to imagine that his ship had not gone down at all, but had sailed away to some fair harbor of the South, whence he had not cared to return.

It thrilled me even to touch one of those weather-beaten hulls. The humblest and most unwashed seaman wrought a spell upon me as he made a pretense of polishing a bit of brass or of mopping up the afterdeck. He had braved fierce storms. He had spent long nights spinning yarns in the forecastle. Perhaps he had been wrecked and had drifted for weeks in an open boat. It might be that he had been driven by storms into those gloomy seas of the South—even to the very edge of my Antarctic world!

When they would let me I went on board, to fall over things and ask questions. My knowledge of shipping was about what could be expected of one whose life had been spent on the prairies of the West, with now and then a fleeting glimpse of a Mississippi River steamer. I suppose they wondered how I could be so interested in a subject, concerning which I displayed such a distressing lack of knowledge. They were willing to enlighten me, however, for considerations of tobacco or money, and daily I made new bosom friends—some of them, I suspect, as unholy a lot of sea-rovers as ever found reward at the end of a yard-arm.

I did not seek technical instruction. What I yearned for was their personal experiences, and these they painted for me in colorings of the sea and sky, and in such measure as the supplies were forthcoming. Almost to a man they readily remembered my Uncle Nicholas, but as they differed widely concerning his stature, complexion and general attributes, I was prone to believe at last that they would have recalled him quite as willingly under any other name; and indeed I found this to be true when I made the experiment, finally, of giving his name as Hopkins, or Pierce, or Samelson, instead of the real one, which had been Lovejoy.

I gathered courage presently to interview the officers, but these I found rather less entertaining, perhaps because they were more truthful. Only one of them recalled my Uncle Nicholas, a kindly first mate, and I suspect that even this effort resulted from a desire to please rather than from any real mental process or strict regard for verities.

I suppose I annoyed them, too, for I threw out a hint now and then which suggested my becoming a part of their ship’s company, though in what capacity or for what purpose neither I nor they could possibly imagine. As for my Antarctic scheme, I presently avoided mentioning it, or, at most, referred to it but timidly. Indeed, I demeaned myself so far at times as to recall it in jest as the wild fancy of some mythical third party whose reasoning and mentality were properly matters of ridicule and contempt.

For I had discovered early in the game that the conception of a warm country at the South Pole appealed as little to the seaman as to the scientist. The sailors whom I had subsidized most liberally regarded me with suspicion and unconsciously touched their foreheads at the suggestion, while the kindly first officer, who had been willing to remember my uncle, promptly forgot him again and walked away.

I passed my days at length in wandering rather silently about the docks and shipping offices, seeking to invest my slender means in some venture or adventure of the sea that would take me into many ports and perhaps yield me a modest income besides. I consulted a clairvoyant among other things, a greasy person on Twenty-third Street, who took me into a dim, dingy room and told me that I was contemplating something-or-other and that somebody-or-other would have something-or-other to do with it. This was good as far as it went. I was, in fact, contemplating most of the time. I was ready for anything—to explore, to filibuster, to seek for hidden treasure—to go anywhere and to do anything that would make me fairly and legitimately a part and parcel with the sea. I read one morning of a daring voyager who in a small boat had set out to sail around the world alone. I would have given all that I possessed to have gone with him, and for a few moments I think I even contemplated a similar undertaking. But as I did not then know a gaff from a flying-jib, and realizing that my voyage would probably be completed with suddenness and violence somewhere in the neighborhood of Sandy Hook, I resisted the impulse. As for my Antarctic dream, its realization seemed even farther away than when as a boy I had first conceived it, some fifteen years before.

V. I OVERHAUL THE STEAM YACHT, BILLOWCREST.

It was early spring when I had arrived in New York, and the summer heat had begun to wane when I first set eyes on the Billowcrest, and its owner, Chauncey Gale.

On one of those cool mornings that usually come during the first days of August I was taking a stroll up Riverside Drive. Below me lay the blue Hudson, and at a little dock just beyond Grant’s Tomb a vessel was anchored. Looking down on her from above it was evident, even to my unprofessional eye, that she was an unusual craft. Her hull was painted white like that of a pleasure yacht and its model appeared to have been constructed on some such lines. Also, an awning sheltered her decks, suggesting the sumptuous pleasures of the truly rich. But she was much larger than any yacht I had ever seen, and fully bark-rigged—carrying both steam and sail. She was wider, too, in proportion to her length, and her cabins seemed rather curiously disposed. A man laboring up the slope took occasion to enlighten me. He had just investigated on his own account.

“Great boat, that,” he panted. “Cost a million, and belongs to a man named Gale. Made his money in real estate and built her himself, after his own ideas. He wasn’t a sailor at all, but he’d planned lots of houses and knew what he wanted, and had the money to pay for it. No other boat like her in the world and not apt to be; but she suits him and she goes all right, and that’s all that’s necessary, ain’t it?”

I said that it was, and I presently went down to look at her. I do not now remember that I was prompted by any other motive than to see, if possible, what a man looked like who could afford to disregard the laws and traditions of ship architecture, and build and own a million dollar steamer after his own model, and for his own pleasure. Also, I had a natural curiosity to learn something of what sort of vessel would result from these conditions.