After he had seen the whaling fleet sail away, he ventured back to the Eskimo village on shore where he was welcomed by the natives. He soon found that escape by land was practically impossible; the nearest white settlement was hundreds of miles distant and he would have to thread his way through pathless forests and across ranges of mountains covered at all seasons with ice and snow. Moreover, he learned what he should have known before he ran away that no vessels except whaling ships, their tender, and an occasional revenue cutter ever touched at Port Clarence which at that time was far north of the outmost verge of the world's commerce. There was nothing left for him to do but settle among the Eskimos and wait for the arrival of the whaling fleet in the following summer. During the long Arctic night, with the temperature forty and fifty degrees below zero, he lived in an igloo after the manner of the natives; learned to eat raw meat and blubber--there was nothing else to eat--became fluent in the Eskimo language; and took an Eskimo girl for a wife. He found existence among these human anachronisms left over from the stone age a monotonously dreary and soul-wearying experience, and he waited with nervous impatience for the coming of the fleet with its annual opportunity for getting back to civilization. The first year passed and the ships anchored in Port Clarence. He hurried out in his kyack to ask the Captains for permission to work his way back to San Francisco. He never once doubted that they would give him his chance. But a sad surprise was in store for him. From ship to ship he went, begging to be allowed to remain aboard, but the hard-hearted captains coldly refused him, one after the other. He was a deserter, they told him; he had made his bed and he could lie in it; to take him away would encourage others to desert. Some captains cursed him; some ordered him off their vessels. Finally the ships sailed away for the whaling grounds, leaving him marooned on the bleak shore to pass another year in the squalor of his igloo. Next year when the whaling fleet came again it was the same story over again. Again he watched the ships arrive with a heart beating high with hope and again he saw their topmasts disappear over the horizon, leaving him hopeless and wretched behind. Before he came aboard the brig, he had made the rounds of the other ships and had met with the same refusals as of yore. I saw him go aft and plead with Captain Shorey and that stern old sea dog turned him down as curtly as the other skippers had done. The ships sailed away, leaving him to his fate. To me his story was the most pathetic that ever fell within my personal experience. I never learned whether he ever managed somehow to get back home or left his bones to bleach upon the frozen tundra.