Sometimes severe snow storms arise when
the men are hunting on the floe, and then the men are often lost.
Sometimes the ships are crushed in the big floe and go to the bottom.
The latest of these disasters was the disappearance of the _Southern
Cross_, with a crew of one hundred seventy-five men.
One of my good friends, Captain Jacob Kean, used to command the
_Virginia Lake_, one of the largest of the sealers. She carried a crew
of about two hundred men. A few years before Captain Kean lost his
life in one of the awful sea disasters of the coast, he related to me
one of his experiences at the sealing.
Captain Kean was in luck that year, and found the seals early and in
great numbers. The crew had made a good hunt on the floe, and they are
loading them with about a third of a cargo aboard when suddenly the
ice closed in and the _Virginia Lake_ was "pinched," with the result
that a good sized hole was broken in her planking on the port side
forward below the water line. The sea rushed in, and it looked for a
time as though the vessel would sink, and there were not boats enough
to accommodate the crew even if boats could have been used, which was
hardly possible under the conditions, for the sea was clogged with
heaving ice pans.
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