Adaptability

As an illustration of adaptability to circumstances and the willingness to take chances in order to achieve results of any kind, of the men who open up another country to civilization, a recent incident is instructive:

       A little schooner reached Seattle recently from Nome, on Bering Sea. She had made the voyage down during the most tempestuous season of the year in the North Pacific, and had survived storms which tried well-found steamships of the better class. Yet there was not a man on board, from the captain down, who had ever made a voyage at sea, save as passengers, on a boat running to Alaska. There were no navigating instruments on board save a compass and an obsolete Russian chart of the North Pacific.

       These men wanted to come out for the winter, and there was no other way within their means to accomplish the trip. They got hold of the schooner and they started with her. They were not seamen or navigators, simply handy men who were accustomed to doing things for themselves. This was out of the routine, but they did it.

       The men who made the voyage down from Nome in a little schooner without any previous knowledge of seamanship probably nothing remarkable in the feat. They were used to doing things that had to be done with the material that came to hand, whether they knew anything about how it should be done or not. Seattle Post-Intelligencer