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regretful note of a last look at the ice, of a final glimpse u of the great Right whale. For it is not the East only O that keeps a-calling.

We are not parting with Captain Cook just yet, but before leaving the subject of Arctic Whaling I should like to touch on one of its many recorded tragedies, if only to indicate what might have happened to those Americans had their position in the ice been a little more remote, had they been out of touch with the amiable Eskimos. In February 1866, the 'Diana,' of Hull, sailed northwards, her adventurers purposing, first, to kill seals around Jan Mayen, and, later, Black Whales in Baffin's Bay. They got no seals, narrowly escaping shipwreck in the region of that dread and desolate isle-the bare glimpse of which once chilled me as no view of Nature has ever done-and they took but two whales before the Arctic, wickeder than usual that season, confounded them and showed them the horrors of the hell that lies below Zero. It was a bad summer for all the ships up there, but the 'Diana' had more than her share of ill-fortune. After a heavy storm she found herself a solitary prisoner, icebound in that great gulf of sinister fame, Melville Bay, with a few days' coal for her paltry 30 h.p. engine, and about seven hundred solid miles between her and freedom. In six months' time the ice-pack, if it did not crush her, would carry her South to the open sea-but her company of fifty men had provisions for only ten weeks. The tide of the long darkness was at hand; the last animals and birds had fled from the frigid wrath to come; the cold bit deeper and deeper; for. lack of fuel the walls and roofs of the cabins became glazed with ice; the nights were miseries.

The tale is told in the diary of the surgeon, a Quaker, as good a Christian and gallant a gentleman as ever fought for the souls and bodies of his fellows; much of it was written in pencil because the ink was as solid as the sea. For that ship's company, weakened by want of nourishment, there was no healthy recreation, no festivity; their only exercise came in unwelcome spells of weary pumping, or when the harsh creaking of timbers sent them frantically to the ice, with their poor belongings and bits of food. Towards Christmas the captain, a genial old chap, a great spinner of whaling

yarns-somehow the bullies and brutes seem to have avoided the Arctic--who had been ailing, collapsed. Here is the surgeon's picture of Christmas Eve:

'About 2 p.m. there was some heavy pressure upon the ship, and all hands were called to prepare for the worst. On going into the cabin, it was evident that the poor old captain had heard the groaning of the timbers . . . a great change had taken place for the worse. The mate told him he must be dressed in readiness for going upon the ice. He kept grasping my hand convulsively, as though wishful for human sympathy in his extremity, whilst the ship was groaning, quaking and writhing, the boards of the cabin jumping under our feet.'

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The ship survived. The captain died on the day after Christmas. Then came the worst of all-scurvy. It is a word made familiar by the sea-stories of earlier days. As a boy, I imagined it as something rather horrid. The surgeon of the 'Diana' was to learn how devilishly horrid—and the ship held nothing whereby the disease might be prevented, combated, much less cured. It broke the courage, as well as the body; brought down one sturdy spirit after another. Men stumbled and fell, and lay where they fell, sobbing. Men who had led in the daily devotions blasphemed openly. Friends hated each other. To such a pass had the Arctic brought the bravest and best of fellows. But for this young surgeon who worked (at anything and everything) and prayed without ceasing, the mate, and one or two others, the tragedy would have been complete. As it was, the Diana,' when delivered from the ice in March 1867, had lost her captain and ten men, and three others died when within sight of their homes in the Shetlands, while the rest crawled painfully about their shipboard tasks. It was in keeping with the Diarist's fine modesty that the Diary lay unpublished for half a century. To his son we are indebted for the editing and publication of this sincere, moving narrative of strange and terrible events, relieved by brisk descriptions and gleams of humour, illumined and warmed throughout by sheer human goodness. 'Without him,' declared one of the survivors, we should have perished.' No monument ever bore finer epitaph.

'Home,' says Captain Cook, 'always looks good to the sailor coming back from a long voyage. That joy had been mine many times, but never as now, when I realised that the cares and responsibilities and desperate straits of that voyage had passed, and I once more breathed the air of our own home!' And about two years later he remarks: 'I had got tired of being ashore so long, and longed for a trip again on the old ocean,'this in explanation of the fact that, Mrs. Cook's health having gradually improved, he had bought a small vessel called the 'Valkyria,' and was off on a cruise for Sperm whales, on what the whalemen called the 'western grounds,' that is, the Atlantic between the Bermudas and the Azores. It was a successful cruise— twenty-seven whales-and in the following year he had built a brigantine-in the photograph she looks like a yacht-with accommodation for his wife, after whom it was named the 'Viola.' In June 1910, together they set out-are not they a mighty fine couple!-on a two-years' cruise after the Cachalot. At the outset they did pretty well, but it was in February 1911, that there came to pass the thing which any reader who knows anything about the Sperm Whale must have been wishing might befall the Captain. In the interior of one of their captures they discovered a large lump of that unlovely, precious substance known as Ambergris. The lump weighed one hundred and fifty pounds and, later, sold for thirty thousand dollars.

On so cheerful a note, though his whaling days were not to end till 1916, when he retired, it seems fitting that I should cease, with my respectful salute and best thanks to Captain John A. Cook. At the risk of being deemed ungracious, there is one thing I would name as an omission-a map of the Arctic. Readers would find it very helpful, and the book is worthy of it.

J. J. BELL.

Art. 4.-MACHIAVELLI AND THE PRESENT TIME.

WHEN Robert Mohl published, some sixty years ago, his admirable 'History of Political Literature,' the bibliography of comment upon Machiavelli was already ample enough to occupy therein some ninety pages; and the succeeding period has shown no diminution in volume. The paradox embodied by the great Italian has, indeed, been made far more intelligible to-day by the labours of subsequent historians; though the issues he raised are no more susceptible of a final solution than they were in his own time. For the relation of ethics to politics is not a simple problem capable of definition without regard to time and space. It involves an attitude to fundamental questions-the meaning of historic experience, the nature of man, the purpose of the State. These will present themselves differently to thinkers according to the conditions they confront. For political philosophy is, by its very nature, pragmatic. Its practitioners do not sit down to write a treatise as dispassionate and universal as an exposition of geometry. In a real sense, what they attempt is autobiography, the reaction upon themselves of a special environment individually interpreted. After all, what we call the great political thinkers are only those whose reactions have been most coincident with the eternal experience of mankind.

No thinker has so suffered at the hands of his interpreters as Machiavelli. Most generally, it has been assumed that he made a Moloch of success; and, regardless either of his assumptions or of his environment, such critics have set themselves to show that, despite him, honesty can be made to pay. Or it has been urged that he was a great satirist, and that his book is a veiled attack, the more keenly made because of its disguise, upon the methods of the Italian tyrant; by revealing, it is said, the logic of remorseless tyranny, Machiavelli demonstrated its final wickedness. Or, once more, it has been argued that the doctrines he seemed to preach are, in fact, the simple truth about human nature in politics; and we are bidden, as Catherine de' Medici is said to have enjoined upon her children, to

instruct ourselves by reading 'surtout des traictz de cet athée Machiavel. Another school prefers the theory of Machiavelli the patriot; and we are then urged to regard him as the far-sighted precursor of Mazzini and Cavour. Two things, at least, are certain. To understand Machiavelli we must regard him essentially as an Italian of the 16th century; and, further, we must read the 'Prince,' not as a summary of his creed, but as a fragment of a larger whole, of which, for instance, the far more profound 'Discourses' are at least of equal significance. In this ample context, there emerges a Machiavelli essentially human, even if less simple than most critics would make him. The complexity is important; for Machiavelli was a great man, and, save in the sphere of religion, great men have rarely the character of simplicity.

Machiavelli, indeed, is peculiarly unintelligible save in the context of the feverish and decadent brilliance of Italy at the end of the 15th century. A man of ambition, an ardent lover of his country, bitten, like most of that hard-living and passionate generation, with the hunger for power and fame, he differs mainly from the mass of his contemporaries in his capacity to digest the experience he encountered. Nor must we fail to emphasise the degree in which he was of his age. Like it, he sought to specialise in universality. The diplomat is the administrator; the historian is also the strategist; the political philosopher wrote poetry which, without distinction, is at least not contemptible, and one comedy which competent judges have declared at least equal to Goldoni and hardly inferior to the best of Congreve.

To exhaust the potentialities of human nature, to dare all by experiencing all, was the keynote of the time. A new world had come into being. The old landmarks had been swept away; religion had ceased, at least for ambitious men, to be a canon of conduct, and had become an instrument of control. Birth counted less than capacity as the avenue to position. Status had vanished before the subtle brain and the iron will of the new men. Careers like those of the Medici and the Sforza had shown the immense opportunities laid open to men careless of tradition and willing to make all things new. This febrile spaciousness was true not

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