Jack Heaton, Wireless Operator/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
Catching Seals by Wireless
WHAT did I do when I got back, did you say? Well, after the sinking of the Andalusian my folks thought I ought to be willing to give up the sea and confine my adventures to Montclair, the Lackawanna Railroad and New York, and they urged me to settle down and sell engines, or get into some other kind of business in the big town and commute like the rest of the suburbanites.
I tried it for a few months but the air is dead on land and it stifles me like poison-gas when I breathe it, and besides, I kept hearing the call of the sea oftener and oftener and louder and louder just as though a spook mermaid were holding a conch shell to my ear.
Well, sir, there were just no two ways about it. I was not cut out for a salesman but I could handle a key with the best of them. So one bright day—it was the first of March—when dad told me to go out and see a prospect who wanted a 40 horse-power crude oil engine, I made one stone kill two sparrows and after fencing with the would-be buyer for half an hour I slipped over to the Lord’s Court Building where the Marconi Company had their offices and talked with my friend Sammis, the Chief Engineer.
“No, there isn’t anything you’d want just now,” he reflected. “There’s a couple of new ships building in Belfast for the Cunard Line and one of them will be launched in a couple of months. I might be able to get a berth for you on her.”
“I want to go right now if I go at all,” I told him, for the land ached in my bones like the old Harry and I knew the only way I could get relief was to go to sea.
“How would you like to go on a seal catching expedition to the Arctic? It ought to be a pretty good health trip for an overworked salesman. The Polar Bear and Midnight Sun sail in a couple of weeks from St. Johns, Newfoundland, to be gone for a month or so and the pay is double that of any operator in the trans-atlantic service. I have just shipped an operator named Mackey up there and gave him the post on the Midnight Sun so you’ll have company, for they will sail together. If you’ll take it I’ll try to get you a good berth in the meantime.”
“To the Arctic,” I ejaculated. “Well, Sammis, this is a voyage I’ll have to sleep over, but it sounds good to me. I’ll let you know in the morning.”
There wasn’t the slightest doubt in my mind but that I’d take it but I didn’t know exactly what my folks would say about it, for their idea was that they had had enough of my going to sea and they further thought that I ought now to be perfectly satisfied to stay on land for the rest of my natural life.
Do you know that when I stepped out of the Lord’s Court Building after having signed up the next day I could feel the stone sidewalk rolling under me like the deck of a ship and that the putrid air of Wall Street smelled as if it had a dash of sea salt in it. That’s how great I felt. Dad would have to get some one else to sell his engines—it was the Arctic for me!
On arriving at St. Johns I at once hunted up
Captain James of the Polar Bear and handed him my commission. And such a captain he was! He looked a different race of seafaring men from the captains I had seen in the regular Atlantic service.
His. grizzled hair and beard and clear, keen eyes were gray; that part of his face which showed was about two shades lighter than the color of dried walrus meat and with his silence—except when any of the crew failed in his duties—you would have known, even if you’d met him on Broadway, that his home was somewhere inside the Arctic Circle. He turned me over to his first mate who also looked as if he had a heart of oak and would be equal to any duty he might be called on to perform if it was north of latitude 75 degrees, the latitude at St. Johns.
And, oh, the crew! They were cutters of the old school, every one of them. I had no idea that sailors of their kind were to be found anywhere at this time here on earth except in song and story, but there they actually were all about me in the living flesh. There was an air about them that told as plainly as spoken words they had weathered many a polar storm and that now, even at St. Johns, they were way too far south of the bleak, frozen regions to be in their element.
And say, the ship! She was a beaut of the old wooden kind, not a whole lot to look at, but built to stand the strains of furious gales as well as the tremendous pressures of the ice packs. Indeed, she had been one of Commander Peary’s ships which had been farthest north when that explorer sought to find the North Pole some years before.
The wireless apparatus and I were the only objects on the ship that seemed not to belong to her, but when we reached the sealing grounds we found ourselves and helped in the catch, thereby making friends with the Captain and his crew.
The transmitter was formed of a single ten inch induction coil which was energized by a current of the ship’s dynamo. The receiver was of the regular Marconi type with a magnetic detector. The masts of the Polar Bear were only fifty feet apart and an aerial made up of half-a-dozen wires swung between them.
Whoever installed the equipment stopped at the aerial for there was no ground. It was no small job to get a decent ground for the ship, as I have said before, was an old-timer and had a wooden hull. Now where a ship has a steel hull all you’ve got to do to make a ground is to simply connect the ground wire to a water pipe, or any other metal part of the ship, for these lead to the steel hull; as the hull sets in the water the very best kind of a ground is had without any trouble to get it. But what’s to be done when there’s nothing but an old-fashioned wooden hull between your instruments and the water? The way I did it was to run a wire from the instruments down to the engine room; then the assistant engineer fixed a 6 × 6 × 24 inch block of wood parallel with and close to the propeller shaft; this done we screwed a copper brush, that is a strip of stiff sheet copper, to the block so that it pressed flat on and hard against the shaft.
Under the head of one of the screws I looped the free end of my ground wire and screwed it down tight. This made a good enough ground connection through the shaft and the propeller keyed to it which was submerged in the water. With this transmitter, aerial and ground, I could cover 100 miles or so when the conditions were favorable.
Everything was hustle and bustle on board and all around us, for at that time of the year—it was nearing the middle of March—a score or more of ships steam from St. Johns along the great Labrador Coast to the frozen north where the young harp seals are found by the thousands on the ice floes off the coast.
Of all the ships at St. Johns I saw only one other that was fitted with an aerial and when I got my apparatus in order I made my way over to her to see Mackey, her operator.
In days gone by the sealing ships were all schooners and just as these gave way to wooden steamers so the latter will be supplanted by ships with steel hulls, and the Midnight Sun was the first of these fine new steel craft. For size and power she put it all over the Polar Bear, but she lacked the glamor of romance and for this reason I liked my ship the best.
I had met Mackey, her operator, at Liverpool once and we straightway became better acquainted. He told me that the firm who owned the Polar Bear also owned the Midnight Sun and that the Captains of them were to work together. A new experiment was to be tried, he said, and that was to catch seals by wireless, but what the modus operandi of the scheme was he hadn’t the faintest idea and no more had I. I remember when I was a little boy that folks talked about running street cars by electricity and I wondered how it could be done. I had a kind of a vague notion that a chunk of electricity came along, struck the car and pushed it ahead just as a breeze fills the sails of a ship and carries her for’ard.
In after years I learned that the current of electricity flowed along a wire parallel with the tracks and that it passed from this feeder to the trolley of a car, thence down a conductor to a motor which it energized and finally back to the power house through the rails; further that it was the power of the motor thus developed which drove the wheels of the car; and I was disappointed, for it seemed to me to be altogether too round-about a way—too far-fetched—to justify the statement that the “car runs by electricity.”
The same thing holds good when you see signs which read, “hats cleaned by electricity,” “eqgs hatched by electricity” and “diamonds made by electricity,” for the hat is merely rotated by an electric motor, the eggs are hatched flowing through a wire, and the diamonds are made in an electric furnace.
Now catching seals by wireless was to my mind quite a vague, mysterious and altogether a difficult proposition to see into—even as running a car by electricity was when I was a little shaver. Seals are wonderful creatures, as you will admit if you ever saw them do a balancing act in a show, and I have heard that they have a great liking for music. A seal hunter can take a phonograph, put a band record on it, set it up where there is a patch of seals and start it going. The seals will come out of the water to listen to the sweet strains and every time one puts its nose above the surface the hunter, who is lying a little way off, will shoot it with his rifle. This then is what you might call hunting seals with music.
It looked to me as if we might be told to send out a line of wireless waves to a patch of seals, bend up the ends of a few dashes and when the seals had swallowed them the sailors would heave ho and pull them aboard. But no, catching seals by wireless was not done in quite so direct a fashion, as you will presently see.
We only made one stop after we left St. Johns and that was at Cartwright, near the mouth of the Hamilton River, on the bleak coast of Labrador. And wireless, let me say right here, has been a big factor in changing life, such as it is, in this wild, forbidding country.
Labrador, you know, is a narrow strip of coastland along the edge of the province of Quebec. It is from 10 to 50 miles wide, but a thousand miles long, reaching from Belle Isle Strait which separates the lower end of it from Newfoundland to Hudson Strait which lies within the Arctic Circle.
The inhabitants live only on the coast and these are made up chiefly of Eskimos in the north and Indians in the south, and all along and in between are trappers, fishermen and live yeres. The trappers push into the interior a little way to run their lines of traps and in the spring of the year thousands of fishermen come up from Newfoundland to take the codfish, which abound off the coast at this season of the year. If you ask one of the poor, ignorant white inhabitants about himself he will say that he lives yere, hence the nick-name of this fixed part of the population. The condi-tion of all these poor, simple folk has been much improved by wireless.
For many years the mail-boat was the only steamer that made calls at all the ports along the coast and she did this about every six months. If any one wanted to get something from St. Johns he had to know it a long way ahead of time and even when he was thoughtful enough to order it the chances are that by the time it reached him he had forgotten he had ordered it or had gotten over wanting it.
On the mail-boat there was a doctor and the inhabitants had to wait to get sick until he came, or perhaps, it would be stating the case a little more accurately to say that however ill they might be they had to wait until he came before they could be treated. Anything might and often did happen to his patients between calls. But all this has been changed by wireless which now links up the towns along the coast with Battle Harbor where the Royal Deep Sea Mission has its hospital for fishermen, and not only may supplies be ordered but, what is of far greater importance, the sick may have their diseases diagnosed and medicine prescribed though they are as far away as Maine, by the doctor in charge and all in the twinkling of an electric wave.
As we steamed up the coast the ice fields began to loom up and as far as the eye could reach they glittered and sparkled like gigantic jewels under the glare of the Arctic sun. When night came on and the stars came out they shone a hundred fold brighter than in the temperate zone and the pale blue moon illuminated the scene with a kind of a supernatural light that seemed not to belong to earth.
But all the days and nights were by no means fine ones, for howling gales and fierce snow storms continually sprang up and I often wondered how a ship built and sailed by the hands of men, could weather them out. It was a man’s work! On such occasions I stuck to my wireless room which I found mighty comfortable and trusted to the Captain and his mates to see the ship safely through.
As we got farther and farther north the Aurora borealis, or northern lights as it is called, grew brighter and brighter every night until the whole heavens in the region of the North Pole were scintillating with streamers that spread out like a great fan, reaching over our heads and far to the south. ‘The first mate said that it was as brilliant an aurora as he had ever seen and his explanation of it was that the spots on the sun had been unusually large and numerous.
Not only did the sun’s activity show itself in the aurora, but it set up a violent magnetic storm on earth and this made the compass needles oscillate to and fro as much as 1½ degrees on each side of their normal positions. Now magnetic storms always interfere very seriously with the operation of both overland telegraph lines and cable systems where the circuit is completed through the earth.
I had heard some one say, or had read somewhere, that a magnetic storm would interfere in the same way with wireless messages and I was fearful for some time that it would put our signals out of commission. But all through the magnetic storm Mackey and I sent our messages without the slightest trouble—indeed if we had not been told that a magnetic storm was on we should never have guessed it. Evidently wireless had scored another point over the wire systems and another pet theory was put on the ice to cool.
We sailed up the coast keeping pretty close to it while the Midnight Sun steamed up and out from it until we were fifty or more miles apart. Now here is where wireless came in, in catching seals. Over the constantly broadening gap between our ships Mackey and I kept their Captains right in touch with each other.
The Captain of his ship wirelessed that there were any number of old seals about him and this showed, the first mate told me, that there were patches of white coats, as the young harp-seals are called, somewhere in the neighborhood.
Our ship immediately headed in his direction and a night’s steaming brought us within a few miles of the Midnight Sun, but we did not see any white coats either. But after we scouted around for five or six hours we sighted a patch of hundreds upon hundreds of little seal babies basking on the ice floes in the sun. My Captain ordered me to signal the good news of our find to the Captain of the Midnight Sun; he in turn steamed at once for our ship and when she came up the killing began.
These seals are called harp-seals because they have brownish yellow bodies and on the back of each one is a big black mark like a harp. The old harp-seals start from way up north of Melville Sound in the early part of the winter and by March they are off the Labrador coast. There tens of thousands of them herd together on the drifting ice when the little white-coats, as the baby seals are called because their fur is so white, are born and, curiously enough, nearly all of them are born on the same day.
It was a great sight to see these fat roly-poly baby seals lying on their backs on the drifting ice and using their flippers to fan themselves with to keep cool.
A few days later the ships were so close to each other that Mackey and I visited back and forth across the ice while the crews were busy taking the seals. When we headed for St. Johns we had on board our ship more than twenty-five thousand sealskins, which was as big a load as we could carry, while the Midnight Sun had nearly fifty thousand and together we broke all previous records.
This being the case these hardened Arctic Captains were as tickled as a couple of sea-urchins and both agreed that wireless was the greatest sealing scheme introduced since steamers took the place of schooners.
Before we bore up for St. Johns there were great doings on board both ships. Rockets were fired in lieu of regular fireworks and Mackey, having the most powerful set, sent a message to old Boreas and old Arcticus who are pioneers in the refrigerating business, and if the North Pole has an aerial suspended from it and the latter has a receiver attached to it, I doubt not but that they listened-in to the first wireless signals ever sent within the polar circle; if so, they heard some mighty fine things said about themselves and the glorious, though, withal frigid, country they rule over.
I wouldn’t have missed that experience for a million dollars—what’s that?—well, not for a hundred dollars in real money anyway.