"And who do you think was skipper of her? Dandy Jim of old Carolina." Sailors: "Blow, my bully boys, blow." Gabriel: "And who do you think was second greaser? Why, Pompey Squash, that big buck nigger." Sailors: "Blow, boys, blow." Gabriel: "And what do you think they had for dinner? Monkey lights and donkey's liver." [Illustration: The Lip of a Bowhead Whale] Sailors: "Blow, my bully boys, blow." Gabriel: "And what do you think they had for supper? Old hard tack and Yankee leather. Then blow, my boys, for better weather. Blow, my boys, I love to hear you." Sailors: "Blow, my bully boys, blow." So with a heave and a song we soon had our whale stowed, bone and blubber, below hatches. The _Reindeer_ and the _Helen Marr_ had drifted far away from us by the time our work was finished, but they were still in sight and their try-works smoking. Our whale yielded 1,800 pounds of bone. CHAPTER XIX A NARROW PINCH The whaling fleet divided soon after entering the Arctic Ocean. Some of the ships went straight on north to the whaling grounds about Point Barrow and Herschel Island. The others bore to the westward for the whaling along the ice north of eastern Siberia. We stood to the westward. In a few days we had raised the white coasts of a continent of ice that shut in all the north as far as the eye could see and extended to the Pole and far beyond. With the winds in the autumn always blowing from the northwest, the sea was perfectly calm in the lee of this indestructible polar cap. I have been out in the whale boats when they were heeled over on their beam-ends under double-reefed sails before a gale of wind upon a sea as smooth as the waters of a duck pond. It was now no longer bright twilight at midnight. The sun already well on its journey to the equator, sank earlier and deeper below the horizon. Several hours of darkness began to intervene between its setting and its rising. By September we had a regular succession of days and nights. With the return of night we saw for the first time that electric phenomenon of the Far North, the aurora borealis. Every night during our stay in the Arctic the skies were made brilliant with these shooting lights. I had expected to see waving curtains of rainbow colors, but I saw no colors at any time. The auroras of those skies were of pure white light. A great arch would suddenly shoot across the zenith from horizon to horizon. It was nebulously bright, like a shining milky way or a path of snow upon which moonlight sparkles. You could hear it rustle and crackle distinctly, with a sound like that of heavy silk violently shaken. It shed a cold white radiance over the sea like the light of arc lamps, much brighter than the strongest moonlight.