CARGO OF WHITE FURS

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 223, 14 January 1911, Page 10

CARGO OF WHITE FURS

Along one of the quaysides of the West India Docks, where a tangle of spars and cordage of great merchant ships make a vista through the red sun and grey mist of these November days, there lies an old barque called the Pelican, which has just come home with a precious cargo from the Arctic Circle, wrote a London correspondent on the 16th ult. She has brought to London over £100,(WO worth of white furs—those furs which in a few w<eeks will be worn not only in London, but in all great capitals of Europe, where the women of wealth adorn their beauty with the skins of beasts.

This ship has a story of adventure and romance. She has a history, also, for the white woman who looks out from her bows, with a pelican at her side, is the figure-head of a gunboat of the old British Navy Some of the gun ports are still visible, an.l \\-.r bows are still sheathed in iron. But now she belongs to the Hudson Bay Company, and her chief enemies are the ice floes through which she crunches ler way when winter overtakes her in Northern latitudes.

Twice every year she leaves the grimy squalor of the London Docks and goes with u cargo of provisions, guns, powder, cloth, tools, and other articles of supply and barter to the trading stations of the Hudson Bay Company on the coast of Labrador. To these far outposts she takes food and clothing to lonely officials of the great company who live there in white solitude, and which are given in exchange for the furs to the hunters who bring them from the snow/fields. These trappers are Eskimaux and Indians.

All through the winter they have been mighty hunters in the far North-West, and then, before Uie spring comes, they load their sledges with the furs of bear and fox, and set out with their dog teams on the long lone trail to the trading stations round Hudson Bay and the Labrador coast.

Here and there among them is a French-Canadian trapper, who has abandoned the ways of civilisation and let his hair grow long, has put on mocassins and fars, and has become half a savage, speaking the Indian or the Eskimau dialects and living a, wild life with these sons of a wild nature. The, officers and men of the Pelican do not often see the long teams of the dogsledges, for -when the ship arrives the spring has come and the snows have melted, so that sledging is no longer possible. But the natives are waiting round i the settlements of the Hudson Bay Company eager to barter their furs for the good things brought by the English ship, and the crew of the Pelican have made great white wilderness. A good story is told of her latest voyage home. When six days north of the coast of Ireland, the officer of the watch saw a vessel of her own class bearing down with a full speed of sails. The captain was summoned, and searched her with his glassesc. "By Jove, it is the with his glasses. "By Jove, it is the her home." It was indeed Captain Scott's old ship which sailed on the famous Antartie voyage, and is now a cargo boat again.

The captain of the Pelican ordered all hands aloft, and, crowding on canvas, the fur ship had a merry race with her rival and heat her handsomely bv thirtysix hours into the Port of London.