The Northland ventured on. At Kotsebue she dropped Captain Bartlett; Archdeacon Goodman left her at Point Hope. At Barrow, the metropolis of the Arctic, where no less than eight white people had spent the long dark of winter, Jack Robertson took his cameras and departed. Still there was no night. When Angus tried to sleep, the unflagging day poured through the ports against his eyelids. This was the real Arctic.
Far beyond Barrow, in the mysterious East, and between the yawning mouths of two unmapped rivers, the Northland dropped anchor. On the bleak coast beyond were half a dozen frame buildings—of lumber shipped all the way from Puget Sound—and a duster of green mounds. This was Narwhale Cape, Angus’s destination.
It seemed unwise to attempt an immediate landing. A white line against t
