_And say, the ship!_ She was a beaut of the old wooden kind, not a whole lot to look at, but built to stand the strains of furious gales as well as the tremendous pressures of the ice packs. Indeed, she had been one of Commander Peary’s ships which had been farthest north when that explorer sought to find the North Pole some years before. The wireless apparatus and I were the only objects on the ship that seemed not to belong to her, but when we reached the sealing grounds we found ourselves and helped in the catch, thereby making friends with the Captain and his crew. The transmitter was formed of a single ten inch induction coil which was energized by a current of the ship’s dynamo. The receiver was of the regular Marconi type with a magnetic detector. The masts of the _Polar Bear_ were only fifty feet apart and an aerial made up of half-a-dozen wires swung between them. Whoever installed the equipment stopped at the aerial for there was no _ground_. It was no small job to get a decent _ground_ for the ship, as I have said before, was an old-timer and had a wooden hull. Now where a ship has a steel hull all you’ve got to do to make a _ground_ is to simply connect the ground wire to a water pipe, or any other metal part of the ship, for these lead to the steel hull; as the hull sets in the water the very best kind of a _ground_ is had without any trouble to get it. But what’s to be done when there’s nothing but an old-fashioned wooden hull between your instruments and the water? The way I did it was to run a wire from the instruments down to the engine room; then the assistant engineer fixed a 6 x 6 x 24 inch block of wood parallel with and close to the propeller shaft; this done we screwed a copper _brush_, that is a strip of stiff sheet copper, to the block so that it pressed flat on and hard against the shaft. Under the head of one of the screws I looped the free end of my ground wire and screwed it down tight. This made a good enough ground connection through the shaft and the propeller keyed to it which was submerged in the water. With this transmitter, aerial and ground, I could cover 100 miles or so when the conditions were favorable. Everything was hustle and bustle on board and all around us, for at that time of the year--it was nearing the middle of March--a score or more of ships steam from St. Johns along the great Labrador Coast to the frozen north where the young _harp seals_ are found by the thousands on the ice floes off the coast. Of all the ships at St. Johns I saw only one other that was fitted with an aerial and when I got my apparatus in order I made my way over to her to see Mackey, her operator.