I will not say I regret it now.  Yet I will say that on that decision, cautiously made, though it was “on my discretion,” all our subsequent misfortunes hang.  The Danes were kind to us,—­the Governor especially, though I had to carry the poor fellow bad news about the Duchies and the Danish war, which was all fresh then.  He got up a dance for us, I remember, and there I wrote No. 1 to you.  I could not of course help—­when we left him—­running her up a few degrees to the north, just to see whether there is or is not that passage between Igloolik and Prince Rupert’s Headland (and by the way there is).  After we passed Igloolik, there was such splendid weather, that I just used up a little coal to drive her along the coast of King William’s Land; and there, as we waited for little duck-shooting on the edge of a floe one day, as our luck ordered, a party of natives came on board, and we treated them with hard-tack crumbs and whale-oil.  They fell to dancing, and we to laughing,—­they danced more and we laughed more, till the oldest woman tumbled in her bear-skin bloomers, and came with a smash right on the little cast-iron frame by the wheel, which screened binnacle and compass.  My dear child, there was such a hullalu and such a mess together as I remember now.  We had to apologize, the doctor set her head as well as he could.  We gave them gingerbread from the cabin, to console them, and got them off without a fight.  But the next morning when I cast off from the floe, it proved the beggars had stolen the compass card, needle and all.

My dear Mary, there was not another bit of magnetized iron in the ship.  The government had been very shy of providing instruments of any kind for Confederate cruisers.  Poor Ethan had traded off two compasses only the day before for whalebone spears and skin breeches, neither of which knew the north star from the ace of spades.  And this thing proved of more importance than you will think; it really made me feel that the stuff in the books and the sermons about the mariners’ needle was not quite poetry.

As you shall see, if I ever get through. (Since I began, I have seen the Consul,—­and heard the glorious news from home,—­and am to be presented to the port authorities to-morrow.) It was the most open summer, Mary, ever known there.  If I had not had to be here in October, I would have driven right through Lancaster Sound, by Baring’s Island, and come out into the Pacific.  But here was the honor of the country, and we merely stole back through the Straits.  It was well enough there,—­all daylight, you know.  But after we passed Cape Farewell, we worked her into such fogs, child, as you never saw out of Hyde Park.  Did not I long for that compass-card!  We sailed, and we sailed, and we sailed.  For thirty-seven days I did not get an observation, nor speak a ship!  October!  It was October before we were warm.  At noon we used to sail where we thought it was lightest.  At night I used to keep two men up for a lookout, lash the wheel, and let her drift like a Dutchman.  One way as good as another.  Mary, when I saw the sun at last, enough to get any kind of observation, we were wellnigh three hundred miles northeast of Iceland!  Talk of fogs to me!