[2 D ecember] I went to Ra naow's hut; the snow was brushed off my clothes .... M y boots and pants I took off in the outer part of the hut; then I followed the native, crawling under the deerskin curtain to the only room the hut contained . All the inmates, three women, two men and fo ur children we re naked. It was very wa rm in this place, and the smell was sickening. [l January 1882] Our hut is ten feet by seven deep and five feet high; one can't stand up in it; eight people sleep here on an average; I have slept or tried to sleep when there we re fo urteen in the room , with an open bucket used by all fo r a water closet all the long night, from 5:30PM till 9AM-fifteen hours and a half. Cahill 's notes preserved insights into native customs. On hygiene: "It is one of their h abits to wash their bodies and all cooking utensils, even the tin and spoons we have to eat from, in urine; I told the old woman not to wash my spoon or tin in urine, so now she cleans them with her
tongue." On nutrition: "At night I ate a mess of stuff that I thought very tender, and noticed it was quite slimy; felt kind of sick after eating; asked what it was. Tuccare said it was young walrus. So it was, but it had never been born . I vomited it up and felt better." On medici ne, life, and death : "Early this m orning the natives strangled an old man; his boy was sick, and they think to save the boy's life by giving death to another victim ." The threat of starvation was a constant companion throughout the winter. Cahill suffered and nearly died from scurvy, but he never stopped keepin g hi s daily record of the events and people aro und him. [February 28] "I have to keep in bed today... Another month gone." [March 8] "We have no ambition to read and I a m too ill to think of any subject long at a time. This part of the Search Expedi tion wasn't figured in ."
In M ay of 1882, the New Bedford whaler North Star on its way north to the Bering fishery found the stranded sailors and brought them off. Mos t of the crew transferred to USS Corwin fo r the return to San Francisco. Cahill recovered from
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his nea r-death experience from scurvy and returned to the East Coast. H e left the navy, packed up his fa mily, and they moved to California. Fo rty- two years after the event, a reporter fo r the Oakland Tribune settled him in for an extended interview to enlarge upon his experiences as an Arctic explorer. His recollections as reported in the paper sometimes seem more elaborate, even more lurid than the words of his diary kept in the field. But then, the object from the beginning always was to sell newspapers. ,!,
D avid H irz el is a maritime histo rian and author specializing in A rctic and Antarctic explo ration from the 1820s through Shackleton's Endurance exp edition. As the volunteer coordinator for the Living H istory Program at San Francisco Maritime National H istorical Park since 2 005, he has gained a deep insight into the lives of the everyday seaman during the great Age of Sail. H is new book Rough Weather All Day (Terra Nova Press, 2 014), is available th rough A maz on.com, along with non-fiction works on the Irish Antarctic explorer Tom Crean, Antarctic Voyager and Sailor on Ice (with Robert Falcon Scott) and H old Fast (with Ernest Shackleton).
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