Fifty Years in the Arctic

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 129, 22 August 1927, Page 11

Fifty Years in the Arctic

Record of Old “Gin and Bibles'' ‘ Gin and Bibles,” as the old sailing: mission ship Harmony was irreverently but affectionately named by sailors, is in the shipbreaking yard. No vessel in the Arctic seas was more widely known among sailors and landlubbers all over the world than the Harmony. After half a century in the service of the Moravian Missionary Society, she was sold a few months ago to the Hudson Bay Company. “We sold her,” said the secretary of the mission, after she had been working in the Arctic for over half a century. She was the last of a succession of Harmony ships that have sailed along this coast with supplies for the natives since 1771. The disposal of the ship does not mean that our work is being discontinued. We are getting our supplies to the mission stations in other ways.” A year ago the Harmony left Dartmouth for her last voyage to the trading stations of Labrador. Previously she was a 200-ton whaler, and her arrival at the remote ports of call in the frozen wastes was so great an event that the Eskimos used to fire guns into the air to notify the surrounding populations of her presence. Captain Jackson, who navigated her for so long a period, had some perilous experiences during his office. There is not much value in the ordinary sea chart in those regions, and he was up against' ice and fog always. Originally the Harmony was called the Lorna Doone, and sailed in the Ekstern seas, trading in tea, but she went to the far north as a whaler afterwards for a Dundee firm before being acquired by the Moravian Mission. She has had some queer cargoes. It was said that she took out everything for the natives, from “flour to tombstones,” and her passengers were equally interesting. Some of them were so fascinated by the mysteries of the new life they found in the Arctic regions that they decided to stop. On her last voyage she took out a scientist and anthropologist, as well as a well-known London artist.