Posted inDaily News Science

Alaska Explorers Quit Point Barrow

Geological Survey Party in Arctic Was Believed to Have Been Marooned.

Dr. Philip S. Smith of the Geological Survey and a party of three Washington engineers who were believed marooned at Point Barrow, on the Arctic coast of Alaska, have started in canoes up the Yukon River to Nanana, the northernmost point of the Alaskan railroad, according to word received yesterday at the Geological Survey offices here.

Dr. Smith, J. B. Mertie, R. K. Lynt and Gerald Fitzgerald, who entered the Colville River basin early in the Spring after a sensational dog-sled journey over the Arctic mountain range, drifted down the stream to Point Barrow, the most northernly point under the Stars and Stripes, arriving early in September. Just how they reached the mouth of the Yukon from this village was not explained in the brief message received here, it is thought probable that they were picked up by some whaler that had got through the abnormal ice along the coast this Summer.

Posted inDaily News Maritime & Naval History

The Whale’s Strength

A whale striking Essex on November 20, 1820, depicted in a sketch by Thomas Nickerson

The most dreadful display of the Whale’s strength and prowess yet authentically recorded, was that made on the American Whale ship Essex, Captain Pollard, which sailed from Nantucket for the Pacific Ocean, in August 1849 [sic – it was 1819]. Late in the fall of the same year, when in the latitude forty of the South Pacific, a school of sperm Whales were discovered, and three boats were manned and sent in pursuit. The mate’s boat was struck by one of them, and he was obliged to return to the ship in order to repair the damage.

While he was engaged in that work, a sperm Whale, judged to be eighty three feet long broke water twenty rods from the ship on her weather bow. He was going at the rate of about three knots an hour, and the ship at nearly the same rate, when he struck the bow of the vessel just forward of her chains.