up in a general mêlée and hair-pulling. One of their umpires, who insisted on allowing a nine to bat after it had three men out in order to even up the score, was dragged off the diamond by his heels. They are naturally great gamblers and bet among themselves on the results of the whalers' games.
"A fact that impressed me very much at one of the games that I saw was that the crowd of several hundred people watching our national sport at this faraway corner of the earth, only twenty degrees from the pole, and thousands of miles from railroads or steamship lines, was more widely cosmopolitan than could have been found at any other place on the globe. From the ships were Americans, a hundred or more, men from every seafaring nationality of Europe—Chinese, Japanese and Malays from Tahiti and Hawaii. The colored brother, too, was there, a dozen of him, and several of the players were negroes. Esquimaux of all ages were everywhere, while the red men were represented by the eleven wiry fellows who had snowshoed with me from their home in the valley of the Yukon. One day I noticed that in a little group of eleven, sitting on an overturned sled watching a game, there were representatives of all the five great divisions of the human race.
"There are no men on earth who are more hospitable and more thoroughly good fellows than these whalers of the Arctic Ocean, and it was hard to leave them; but we finally got away and started on the long tramp over the snowy wastes toward the Yukon. Just before we left a notice was posted in the clubhouse which, with many 'whereases,' 'aforesaids,' and other legal formula, recited that the 'Auroras' thought they knew something about ball, and hereby challenged the 'Herschels' to meet them on the diamond within three days."
The New York Sun, in an article published over ten years ago, tells how the game even then had made its way to our colonies, only a few years after the insurrection in Hawaii and the Spanish War had given us our island possessions. Here is the article: