CHAPTER ONE.
THE LAST OF THE CREW.
LOST AND FOUND.
There is a particular spot in those wild regions which lie somewhere
near the northern parts of Baffin's Bay, where Nature seems to have set
up her workshop for the manufacture of icebergs, where Polar bears, in
company with seals and Greenland whales, are wont to gambol, and where
the family of Jack Frost may be said to have taken permanent possession
of the land.
One winter day, in the early part of the eighteenth century, a solitary
man might have been seen in that neighbourhood, travelling on foot over
the frozen sea in a staggering, stumbling, hurried manner, as if his
powers, though not his will, were exhausted.
The man's hairy garb of grey sealskin might have suggested that he was a
denizen of those northern wilds, had not the colour of his face, his
brown locks, and his bushy beard, betokened him a native of a very
different region.
