The Project Gutenberg EBook of Adrift in the Ice-Fields, by Charles W. Hall

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Title: Adrift in the Ice-Fields

Author: Charles W. Hall

Release Date: May 25, 2007 [EBook #21607]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration: ADRIFT. Page 162.]

ADRIFT IN THE ICE-FIELDS.

BY

CAPT. CHARLES W. HALL,
AUTHOR OF "THE GREAT BONANZA," ETC.

_ILLUSTRATED._

BOSTON:
LEE AND SHEPARD, PUBLISHERS.
NEW YORK:
CHARLES T. DILLINGHAM.
1877.

COPYRIGHT:
BY LEE AND SHEPHARD.
1877.

PREFACE.

To open to the youth of America a knowledge of some of the winter sports
of our neighbors of the maritime provinces, with their attendant
pleasures, perils, successes, and reverses, the following tale has been
written.

It does not claim to teach any great moral lesson, or even to be a guide
to the young sportsman; but the habits of all birds and animals treated
of here have been carefully studied, and, with the mode of their
capture, have been truthfully described.

It attempts to chronicle the adventures and misadventures of a party of
English gentlemen, during the early spring, while shooting sea-fowl on
the sea-ice by day, together with the stories with which they whiled
away the long evenings, each of which is intended to illustrate some
peculiar dialect or curious feature of the social life of our colonial
neighbors.

Later in the season the breaking up of the ice carries four hunters into
involuntary wandering, amid the vast ice-pack which in winter fills the
great Gulf of St. Lawrence. Their perils, the shifts to which they are
driven to procure shelter, food, fire, medicine, and other necessaries,
together with their devious drift and final rescue by a sealer, are used
to give interest to what is believed to be a reliable description of the
ice-fields of the Gulf, the habits of the seal, and life on board of a
sealing steamer.

It