When men have no knowledge whatsoever of the danger they run, they are liable to do the most foolhardy thing imaginable and come out of it safely—to the utter astonishment of all old timers.
Here is a striking example of that, which happened a few years ago:
We were forging ahead through the ice of Hudson Straits on an auxiliary schooner. There were on board a lot of “Husky” dogs which we were transferring from one trading station to another.
One morning the man in the crow’s nest saw a small herd of walrus asleep on the ice. Creeping up slowly, we got up to a hundred yards from them before they took any notice of the ship.