Pauline Cove on Herschel Island has three fathoms of water and can winter fifty ships.  Landing and looking about us, we experience a feeling of remoteness, of alienation from the world of railroads and automobiles and opera tickets.  Back of the harbour are the officers’ quarters of the whaling company, the barracks of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, the huts of the Eskimo; in front of us the clear panorama of the mountains on the shore-line.

North America here, in profound and lasting loneliness, dips its shaggy arms and ice-bound capes into an ocean illuminated now by the brief smile of summer but, for ten months out of the twelve, drear and utterly desolate.  The most striking features of the off-shore islands is that they are islands of ice rather than of earth.  Slightly rising above ocean-level, they exhibit one or two feet of sandy soil, and between this scant counterpane and the interior foundations of the earth is nothing but pure translucent ice.  There is going on a rapid disintegrating of these islands.  The whaler calls this far fringe of America “the ocean graveyard” and “the step-mother to ships.”  There have been five wrecks on this coast in recent years:  the Penelope off Shingle Point, the Bonanza off King Point, the Triton on the shores of Herschel itself, the Alexander near Horton River, a little missionary craft off Shingle Point, and Mikklesen’s ship The Duchess of Bedford, abandoning her ambitious search for a dream-continent in Beaufort Sea to deposit her tapped-camphor-wood bones on the edge of the ocean of her quest.

The Mackenzie River carries the freshening influence of its current for miles out to sea, and the whole mainland coast is piled high with drift-trees carried by its stream to the Eskimo,—­a boon more prized by them than the most seductive story the missionary can tell of the harps and golden streets of that strange heaven of the white man where whale-meat is unknown and blubber enters not.

In July, resurrection comes to Herschel,—­saxifrages, white anemones through the snow, the whoop of the mosquito-hawk, and the wild fox dodging among the dwarf-junipers and uncovered graves!  And the Midnight Sun?  It is not a continual blare of light for twenty-four hours.  It sweeps through the midnight heavens, but between ten o’clock in the evening and four in the morning there is a sensible change.  Colour tints and lines of demarcation on sea and ships are harder to distinguish, shadows less clearcut.  Birds roost and even flowers close, Nature whispering to both that, if they would reproduce after their kind in the short Arctic summer, energies must be conserved.  Surely the world holds nothing more beautiful than this Polar night, this compelling gloaming, the “cockshut light” of Francis Thompson.  Here the evening and the morning sit together hand in hand, and, even as you watch, lead in the day, the new day born beneath the starless sky.  The July sun stabs into activity our incongruous community.  On board the vessels guns are cleaned, harpoons pointed, whale-boats caulked, and the winter deck-house is lifted off bodily.  Up in the rigging fox-skins and all the year’s fur-booty sweeten in the sunlight, and eagerly the spring “leads” in the ice are watched from hour to hour if a way be opened to trend out in the track of the big Bowhead.