Arctic Adventures part one?

Apologies! I was out of town for a couple days and was somewhere with no computer/internet access. But I have a little freewrite for today, so that's something. I may do more on this same topic...

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On the last day of Stephen St. Gradie’s fifth Arctic expedition, his findings vaulted him from obscurity to worldwide fame. Had he found nothing on his dig, he would have retired and gone down as an eccentric has-been. As it was, however, he suddenly found himself the toast of the natural history and zoological science societies. For you see, Stephen St. Gradie had found something quite unexpected, and it all started with something small.

St. Gradie had been a solid (if unexciting) explorer in his day, looking for, largely, whatever hadn’t yet been seen and documented. The problem was that there were a lot of other, better explorers already ahead of him. He found himself constantly in second place. On the upside, he had become an excellent cartographer and many remote regions of jungles and mountains were mapped under his exacting eye. But really, what Stephen wanted, what any explorer wanted, was to discover something for himself.

In the last decade of his public career, St. Gradie became convinced that the two parts of the world that had not been explored to death were the bottom of the sea and the treacherous frozen polar caps. Since he was, at heart, a man devoted to the land (and since he had no feasible way to carry air down to the sea floor) he decided the poles were his destiny. He spent years preparing for the expedition: finding men to go with him, gear and supplies that would hold up to the extreme temperatures, a ship that would take them as far as they could go on the route he mapped.

The first expedition ended nearly before it started; their ship could not maneuver between the ice floes, and they spent so long getting the ship free that they had to turn back before they starved to death. As it was, St. Gradie spent months recovering, and the sensation in his hands and feet never fully returned. He was lucky, though, considering most of his crew lost fingers and toes to the cold.

The second expedition took even longer to organize. Stephen had lost a lot of credibility with the disastrous first attempt, and he had to make certain financial adjustments when one of his sponsors backed out. Still, there were many who did believe in him and did believe that he would find something of value in that frozen wasteland. St. Gradie’s second expedition turned up nothing. There had been massive storms, one after another, and they had been quite unable to leave their base camp for any length of time that might facilitate great discoveries. Still, on one of the very few clear days, St. Gradie did learn something valuable: there was another, wider break in the ice that went much further north.

The third expedition cost him all but one of his sponsors. It too, turned up nothing but ice and snow and frostbitten extremities, despite using the new route successfully. He didn’t see so much as a tree branch in the month he spent camped atop the ice.

St. Gradie’s fourth expedition was much smaller and was completely funded through his own money. By this time, the public eye held him as an ice-mad lunatic. Still, no one made to stop him when he pushed off and was gone for, all told, six months. He came back and, almost immediately, began to arrange his fifth and final journey.

On the fifth expedition, he found something amazing frozen in the ice. He and his two assistants had made camp some eight miles east from the ship‘s landing. They had been camped in the same spot for three weeks. When the weather was clear, in the beginning, they had ventured forth to explore the glaciers and crevasses and ice fields. Then, unseasonable storms rolled in, and they were forced to spend their time inside the large base-camp tent, making use of its kerosene heater, or otherwise they would freeze to death. The tent began to settle into the ground, in a combination of increased foot traffic of its floor, and the heat of the living space slowly melting the ice underneath it.

One day, St. Gradie noticed a lump in the ground next to the stove. He thought almost nothing of it; the icy ground was never even. This protrusion simply was in a spot that made each of his assistants stub their toes and trip while tending the fire. It was when he himself tripped over it that he took exception to it. He ordered that, as soon as the weather broke, they were to move the tent to more desirable ground.

Eventually, the weather cleared. But, as his luck was wont to run to the bad, it broke the afternoon before they were scheduled to start back to the ship. There was no sense in moving the tent for one more night.

The fateful morning dawned clear and cold. The assistants hurried to pack everything up again. They crated the stove and other essentials and moved all the luggage out of the tent. Then, they took down the tent as St. Gradie supervised. And then, while folding the ground cloth, one of the assistants tripped.

“Sorry, sir,” he said. “Must be a rock.”

The assistant made to get up.

But St. Gradie’s keen sense of orientation told him something important: it was the same spot where the stove had been, the same spot that had been the cause of so many bruises and stubbed toes and barked shins.

“Don’t move a muscle,” he said to the assistants.

And, ever so carefully, he peeled the cloth off the ice. The assistant on the ground shifted his hands when asked, and eventually he was walked backward off the tent. St. Gradie knelt and examined the rock.

“It’s not a rock,” he said. “Is the teakettle still warm?”

He shoved the second assistant, who fetched the kettle. St. Gradie painstakingly poured the warm water over the ice while the assistants hovered.

The assistant who had fallen snorted.

“It’s just a narwhal,” he said.

St. Gradie got as close as he could to the tiny bit of horn and he studied it for long minutes. Then, finally, he stood. He brushed the ice off his knees.

“You,” he said. He pointed to the second assistant. “Get out my tools and heat some more water, quickly!”

“And you,” he said to the first. “You go to the ship as fast as you can and tell them to bring a sledge.”

“But it’s just a narwhal!”

“It most certainly is not,” said St. Gradie. “And I’ll thank you not to scoff at this major discovery! Now run!”

St. Gradie spent nearly a week extra in the arctic. He and his people had nearly starved to death; they lost two crew members to exhaustion. But it was worth it, in the end. St. Gradie returned home with a unicorn. It was frozen in a block of ice, but it was perfectly, exquisitely preserved. And it was most definitely a unicorn. The only question was: what would become of it?
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Unicorns are awesome. Sometimes I find it interesting to think about what it might have been like at certain times in history, and the days of ship voyage and discovering new lands and things is definitely one of the most interesting ones, I think! There's also plenty of room for me to kind of pick and choose and go in a steampunk sort of direction. I'm really taken with the potential for weird details. I mean, come on. A frozen unicorn plonked down into a land of sci-fi Victorian technologies? It could be very cool.

I remember this book I read a long time ago-- "The Winter of the White Seal" or something similar. Anyway, it's about this ship full of whalers or sealers headed towards one of the poles, and they get blown off course and everyone dies except one man. He lives alone on a terrible little beach backed by a glacier for a really long time. His only companion is a seal that he half-tames...and then tries to kill when he gets really desperate. So then eventually the man takes himself out onto the glacier to die, and he falls through a crevasse/tunnel in the ice, and ends up on a much more habitable beach and, I believe, he eventually gets rescued.

That was a serious digression. Sorry. My point is that adventuring and stuff is very cool, provided you can suspend your disbelief enough to not focus on the lack of technologies at the time. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't seem like a big deal now (like, say, the Oregon trail) but it was a huge thing to do back in the day.

Consider this adventure story a two-parter. I've not yet written enough of the story to lay down my original inspirational scenes. This prologue, if you will, is just catch-up so I won't be scratching my head later trying to figure out how I got to where I'm going.

Also, I am not satisfied with the adventurer's name. I may have to re-spell it or something.

~Later