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