INTRODUCTION
TO the lecturer the introduction is the most interesting part of his lecture, in that it is generally so complimentary that his feeling of guilt and a sense of his own inferiority mars somewhat his whole discourse. My cabin boy, Kennett Rawson, suffers no handicap in this respect. His work is finished. Whatever I may write will not affect its status. His narrative stands as a testimonial of the influence of good and much reading. Very few will believe that such language is natural for a fourteen-year-old boy. But we knew “Ken” in the forecastle of the little Bowdoin, and teachers at Hill School who have watched his progress for two years can assure you that the book is his own.
How fortunate that a boy in his early teens could visit the scenes of our early explorers, the headquarters of the great Peary, who, by his work, has placed before American youth the finest example of persistency, determination, and clean grit in all Arctic history. What a privilege for young Rawson to stand where the immortal Elisha Kent Kane stood with lifted ramrod and fluttering cap lining, the first to step foot on historical Littleton Island, and to enter the Basin which bears his name!
From the heights about Etah he has looked across to the ice-covered hills of Ellesmere Land and Cape Sabine where Greely and his men lay dying in 1884 and where Peary fought a losing fight in 1900-1902. He has seen the last of the S. S. Polaris, which steamed farther north than ship ever steamed, now strewn about the beach rusting, rotting away. But memories of her Commander, the most enthusiastic of all Arctic explorers, will always live.
Something more than pure sentiment. No boy can look upon such things, can dwell upon the deeds of such men as Kane, Hayes, Hall, Greely and Peary, without standing a little more erect, without visualizing his own future and determining to have that future count for something beyond material gain.
With mingled feelings of apprehension, doubt as to the wisdom of my decision, I signed Kennett Rawson on the ship’s papers as “Cabin boy, Chicago, age 14,” the youngest white lad ever to go into the Far North.
Under starlit skies and unruffled sea; in the semi-darkness of his 10-11 watch, I watched him as he stood at the wheel “giving her a spoke” now and then to keep her on her course, his small sheepskin-covered form outlined against the black of the ocean. In howling winds and with the Bowdoin plunging and bucking head seas, decks awash and life lines stretched, the same huddled form, eyes on the compass card, doing his best, with never trace of quit, I, a shipmate for four months, knew him. Young Rawson made good. For that reason he goes back again with me in the Northland one week from to-day, back to the big grey hills of Labrador with their outlying, breaking reefs, to the inner reaches of its green bays, to its simple, sincere people; to Greenland, once the home of the Norsemen, now the land of the Dane and smiling half-breed; to Baffin Island, the Meta Incognita of Martin Frobisher, the objective of many an old New England whaling ship.
May he enjoy this fourth cruise of the Bowdoin as he did her third. “The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts,” and when those thoughts or dreams are realized, doubly fortunate is youth.
DONALD B. MACMILLAN.
Freeport, Maine.
June 12, 1926.