stefansson-wrangel-09-25-004-002

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Cathedral with greater relish than any of the other stories of his adven-
turous life. He was born with a love for musIcx music and with a voice beyond
the ordinary. Apart from the Cathedral choir, he had no musical training
but he had listened to operas in big cities and to native songs in every
corner of the earth, and whatever he heard he could reproduce, modified by
his peculiar temperament and talents. He could play a variety of wind and
string instruments and usually carried an assortment of them with him wher-
ever he went.

And he went nearly everywhere. Besides sailing every
sea, he had been a tramp in Australia and, I think, in Africa. He had
run away from ships in tropical islands both of the East and West Indies.
He had been an officier in the navy of Chile and had "fought" as a lieutenant
on a Chinese ship in the Chinese-Japanese War. When the United States
sent its first revenue cutter to arctic Herschel Island in 1889 to deter-
mine whether that central rendezvous of the new whalemen's paradise was
American or Canadian territory, Hadley was a minor officer on the ship.
The island turned out to be well east of what had previously been agreed
upon as the international boundary. The Government of the United States,
therefore, lacked the power which many wished it had to regulate the rather
turbulent whaler-Eskimo metropolis, and Hadley sailed west beyond Point
Barrow.

But he had seen The Arctic and it pleased Hadley beyond
every country. He returned there in a year or two. The next twenty-five
years he made occasional forays to San Francisco or England but wintered
in the Arctic more than twenty times, always whaling or trapping except for
a brief connection with the Arctic coal mines near Cape Lisburne. No man