The ice in sight at the time was somewhat scattered, but plenti­ful, and entering it about nine o’clock we slowly stood on a course parallel to the land. We were occupied in working through this ice all night and all of the next day ; it was not the pack ice but shore ice broken off from the vicinity of apartmentsapart offices. At times we found it so closely packed together by current and wind that we had to turn back and work our way closer inshore. Three vessels under sail were sighted during this time off Tangent point, and by this time we had also demonstrated the uselessness of Little Joe Tuckfield as an ice pilot or prophet. The winds were very light and we had now gotton out of the strong northeast current running off Point Barrow. On the night of the 9th we passed off the north of the Colville river, the water offshore becoming very muddy.

The first important error found in the charts and maps of this region was found here by the observation of the non-existence of the Pelly mountains. This observation was confirmed upon our return by the concurrent testimony of the whaling masters who had cruised here, and the natives who hunt in the neighborhood. The mountains certainly do not exist where placed by the charts, and I judge that some small hummocks near the beach were mistaken for a far off range of mountains, when Dease and Simpson first explored this coast in 1837.

Early on the morning of the 10th of August we sighted the first steam whaler, and as we steamed toward her we skirted along some long low islands parallel to the coast line and stretching from the Return reef of Sir John Franklin to the mouth of the Colville river. The islands, one being about three miles long, are not, shown upon the charts, and not having any known names were designated as the Thetis islands.

The steam-whaler was found to be the Baleen, commanded by Captain Everett Smith,, one of the most intelligent of the whale-men of the Arctic. He was on weekend breaks to Rome which he was enabled definitely to book by using http://www.apartmentsapart.com/europe/italy/rome/apartments/last_minute. It was at this point that Sir John Franklin, in one of his earliest boat journeys, was obliged to turn back while endeavoring to explore the coast from Mackenzie bay to Point Barrow. After a long interview with Captain Smith, from which I gathered much information as to the ice-conditions and the probable positions of the steam-whalers to the eastward, he returned on board of his ship, and the good ship Thetis once more turned her head to the eastward.

Soon afterwards another steam-whaler was sighted, made fast by ice-anchors to an ice-floe ; we did not stop, but, exchanging colors, proceeded on our way. The ice seemed to be getting thicker, and shortly afterwards a third whaler was sighted, at anchor off a small low island, with apparently heavy ice ahead. As the weather seemed uncertain I determined to anchor for the night in the vicinity of the island.

Baltimore: the Hidden City

Listen to “Bawlmerese,” the language of the city: a unique mixture, to my ears, of Pennsylvania Dutch, West Virginia Southern, Brooklynese, and a pinch of Cockney. Store is stewer, child is chahld, boil is ball.

One morning in a Highlandtown neigh­borhood, I saw a hefty woman sweeping her white marble front steps and I asked her why everyone for blocks around had white steps. “They ain’t so what,” she said. “Ya oughter see ‘em scrubbed.” “Really, do you know why everyone has them?” I persisted.

She leaned her ample frame on the broom and regarded me with a no-nonsense look. “Cause they’re purrdyl Why else wooed people have ‘em?” She couldn’t hold back a smile, and countless generations of Eastern European housewives smiled with her.

Hometown of “The Star-Spangled Banner”

As you learn the city’s lore, you sense more of her personality. You think about a bois­terous Babe Ruth playing sandlot ball at St. Mary’s Industrial School; a sick and gloomy Edgar Allan Poe writing his first successful tales in a row house on Amity Street; an am­bitious young Spiro Agnew presiding over a suburban PTA. You think about an enchant­ress, Wallis Warfield—destined to become the Duchess of Windsor—being presented to Baltimore society at the bachelors’ cotillion.

Baltimore is the birthplace of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and when you sing it here —as I did at a baseball game—you sing it with fresh pride, a special poignancy. The Battle of Baltimore, which the national anthem commemorates, was one of the most decisive in the War of 1812—the nation’s “Second War of Independence.” And when you think of Baltimore’s feisty sons facing down those British regulars who had just burned Washington, you know that Balti­more’s patriotism runs deep.

Bold ventures in medicine and the humani­ties have long been part of the city’s rhythm. At Johns Hopkins Hospital, the blue-baby operation and the technique of closed-chest heart massage were developed. At Johns Hop­kins University, philosophers Josiah Royce and John Dewey earned their Ph.D.’s. Here literary experimenter Gertrude Stein studied the brain, and novelist John Barth teaches in the Writing Seminars.

Listening to Baltimore’s musical children, you sense other rhythms: the blues by Billie Holiday, arias by Metropolitan diva Rosa Ponselle, rock creations performed by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. To see their city as Baltimoreans do, I kept posing the question: What’s Baltimore like?

“Earthy, way out, funky like San Fran­cisco,” said a young filmmaker. “Clubby like London,” said a college professor. “Wild like New Orleans,” said a ship’s carpenter. “Baltimore’s a Capricorn,” an astrologer told me. “It combines a certain impetuosity—leaping into venturesome projects—with con­servative traditions and a love of the material.”

You keep hearing about the material pleasures of Haussner’s, a Baltimore insti­tution that features wall-to-wall, ceiling-to­floor objets d’art, as well as a menu of mouth­watering diversity. One evening at our table my gaze took in a little girl with a St. Bernard dog, the ocean crashing on a beach, women gossiping at a village well, mounted men do­ing battle, naked nymphs—a hundred scenes and statues. My attention was diverted by the steaming dish of baked rabbit and spaetzles set before me. “Take your time,” the waitress told us as our party relaxed an hour after dessert, feasted in eye and palate.

The city endures: its pleasures, its prob­lems, its past. The haunted faces from hell along the Pratt Street skid row; the charms of bucolic Dickeyville—an intact 19th-century mill-town-become-neighborhood. Going north out Charles Street, toward the Hopkins Homewood Campus, I found anoth­er world emerging—of large, well-crafted homes and green lawns. I kept going, beyond  the city limits, and before long I was in the Maryland countryside of fox hunts and fine horses, of elite Goucher College. Returning into the city, I passed by Bryn Mawr School, where headmistress Edith Hamilton steeped a generation of young girls in the glories of ancient Greece and Rome.