The Skipper in Arctic Seas. By W. J. Clutterbuck. (Longmans.)
—The "skipper" of this amusing narrative, which has nothing whatever of the apparently involuntary solemnity that marks the general literature of Arctic travel, is a "landlubber," and an original. In 1888, he and a companion, also a landlubber "by birth and profession, and knowing nothing about the place they were going to, or the paraphernalia of Arctic travel," resolved to go up North, and coast along the ice off Greenland from latitude 70° to 75°. So they engaged an ordinary whaling vessel at Peterhead, with its captain and crew, and they made their voyage. They killed great numbers of seals and many strange birds, but only one polar bear, and, fortunately for the
walrus, they did not reach his home at Spitzbergen. "We took the carpenter with us," remarks the skipper. A little over-facetious, a trifle too "jolly," but amusing and pleasant, and not without information to be extracted from it, this narrative does not altogether deny the mental depression that Arctic life produces ; but it is evident the party on board the 'Traveller' strove man- fully against it. There are charming chapters about icebergs, coast scenery, and birds—totally =disfigured by any scientific treatment of those subjects—and there is a horrid chapter on sharks. Perhaps the skipper is at his best when he gets among the Norwegian fjords.
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