IN ARCTIC SNOWS

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIII, Issue 16, 16 December 1932, Page 12

IN ARCTIC SNOWS

EXPLORERS FEAST ON HARD RATIONS. The solitary Y'uletido of lighthousekeepers and back-country shepherds are almost enviable compared with those recorded by the men who have spent their Christmases amid the desolation off Arctic snow and ice. Of one Christmas Day Dr. Kane, the famous explorer, records: “While walking, my beard and moustache became one solid mass of ice. I inadvertently put out my tongue, and it instantly froze to my lips. When I put up my mittened hand to ‘blow hot,’ and thaw the unruly member from its imprisonment, my mitten was itself a mass of ice in a moment. It fastened on the upper side of my tongue and flattened it out like a batter-cake between the two discs of a hot girdle. It required all my care with the bare hand to release it; and then not without laceration.”

He tells us, too, of another Christmas Day which he and his men celebrated by a theatrical performance. “The ship’s thermometer, outside,” he says, “registered 78 degrees of frost. Inside, the audience of actors, by aid of lungs, lamp and hangings, got as high as minus 30 degrees—only 02 degress below the freezing point, perhaps the lowest atmospheric record of any theatrical presentation. “It was a strange thing altogether. The condensation was so excessive that we could barely see the performers; they walked in a cloud of vapour. Any extra vehemence of delivery was accompanied by volumes of smoke. Their hands steamed. When an excited Thespian took off his coat, it smoked like a dish of potatoes.” Of one of liis Arctic Christmases Dr. Nansen wrote in his diary: “Our resources did not permit us to make the merry Christmas time a particularly l brilliant event, but there were genial I warmth and light, kindly feeling and merry-making at Red Club House. The jdinner was an elaborate affair —salmon, Arctic hare, venison, with cranberry sauce, green peas, tomatoes and corn. Plum-pudding with brandy sauce, apricot pie, pears, coffee, candies, nuts and raisins, with cocktails and Sauterne in which the toast was , drunk. ‘To the flag over us, the brightest that waves, with the hope that our little party may be so fortunate as to add something to its lustre.’ ” There was no such regal feasting as this for him eight years earlier, when Christmas found him in his winter quarters with an almost empty larder. On December 21 Lieutenant Lockwood, a member of the party, wrote in his diary, “By a great effort I was able to save an ounce of bread and two ounces of butter for Christmas. I shall make a vigorous effort to abstain from eating it before then.” VARIED EXPERIENCES.

Few, if any, men have spent Christmas under more varied and romantic conditions than Sir William Maxwell, the well-known war correspondent. “The Christmas of 1907,” he says, “1 passed in a railway train very miserably. 1 had gone to Stockholm for the funeral of King Oscar and had had a memorable interview with the new King and was racing home for Christmas. But the snows descended in avalanches, and train and boat were hours behind, and I spent Christmas Eve in Benin and Christmas Day in the train.”

The next year, Christmas found him in the Black Sea in a German ship. “There was only one other passenger,” he says, “and yet for us on Christmas Day the table was laden with good cheer, the saloon was gay with holly and evergreen, and the Christmas-tree was heavy with gifts. And after dinner the lights were lowered and we drank to absent friends, and the stewards from the gallery above us sang sweet carols that sent our hearts lea.ping over Black Sea and Mediterranean and Atlantic to England and home.” The following Christmas found him among the guests of the ruler of Gwalior' in India, living luxuriously in tents and feasting right merrily with a delightful host who drove his motor car, wore khaki at breakfast, and in the afternoon was a radiant Oriental potentate on a bejewelled elephant. Of his other many adventurous Christmases he spent one in beleaguered Ladysmith. “Our Christmas fare,” he says, “was limited. Potatoes sold at auction for a shilling each; carrots, for sevenpence; eggs were a shilling each; a threepenny packet of cigarettes, 3s 6d; and whisky. £7 a bottle.” Other Yuletides found him in Egypt, Palestine, New York, Canada, Morocco, Bosnia and Manchuria.