So I shut my eyes and said that the ship would have very bad luck that winter, that there would be much sickness aboard. (This was an easy guess.) I said, considering this fact, I was glad to leave such an unwholesome ship. The crew were just aching to get rid of me. This prophesying sort of grows on a man; once you've started it, you've got to go on with it at all costs, and I could no more resist just letting my few remarks slip round amongst the men than I can resist eating when I'm hungry. The nerves of the _Gleaner_ people were in strings from the cold and the blackness of the Arctic night, and it put the horrors on the lot of them. The one thing they wanted was to see the last of me. They gave me almost anything I fancied, but my means of transport were small. There was a bit of a sledge, which I packed with some food, two Henry rifles and a few tools, five hundred cartridges, and the clothes I stood in. No more could be taken. Then I went on deck into the bitter cold and over the side, and stood on the ice, ready to start on my journey. The crew lined the rail to see me off, and I can tell you their faces were very different. The older ones were savage and cared little how soon Jonah might die. The younger ones were crying to see a fellow driven away into that icy loneliness, far from shelter. But for myself I didn't care. I had method in all this performance. Soon after we were beset in the ice, a family of Esquimaux had come on the _Gleaner_ to pay a polite call and get what they could out of us. They were that dirty you could have chipped them with a scaling hammer, but they were very friendly. One buck who stepped down into the engine room--[v]Amatikita, he said his name was--had some English, and came to the point as straight as anything. "Give me a [v]dlink, Cappie," says he. "This is a dry ship," says I. "Plenty dlink in that box," says he, handling an oil-can. "Oh, if that's what you want, take it," I told him, and he clapped the nozzle between his lips, and sucked down a gill of [v]cylinder lubricating oil as though it had been water. "You seem to like it," I said; "have some more." But that was his fill. He thanked me and asked me to visit his village when I could get away from the ship. And just then some of his friends were caught pilfering, and the whole crew of them were bundled away. Now I had noted that most of these Esquimaux had bits of bearskins amongst their other furs, and it was that I had in mind when I fell out with Captain Black. Amatikita had pointed out the direction in which his village lay, and it was to that I intended making my way with as little delay as possible. But I kept this to myself, and let no word of it slip out on the _Gleaner_. Indeed, when I was over the bark's rails, I headed off due north across the ice. I climbed and stumbled on in this direction till I was well out of their sight and hearing amongst the hummocks, and then I turned at right angles for the shore.