Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 December 1883 — Sunburned in the Arctic Regions. [ARTICLE]

Sunburned in the Arctic Regions.

“ The worst trouble that I had in my first voyage north,” said a Maine sailor, “was from sunburn. Yes, sir—sunburn. I eould stand the cold when she was forty degrees below zero; I could stand frozen noses and ear§; but bust my top-rails if I didn’t suffer the torments of hell the first time I got sunburnt in the arctic regions. Ypn see, it w|s this way: We were laid up a few days before the close of summer making repairs, in about seventy-four degrees north latitude, and right early one morning a party of us went ashore to look around. It was pretty cold, and the consequence was we were bundled up in half a dozen thicknesses of underclothes, with fur hoods over our heads, and looked like fleas in a buffalo robe. “Well, sir, along about noon time, what, with the heat of the sun, and the hard exercise that we were taking in getting over . the snow and ice-hum-mocks, I was hot as tarnation, and I just .slipped the hood off my head and went along for awhile with nothing on it. “ ‘Put on that hood, yon fool,’ hollered one of the men. ‘Do you want to get sunburnt ?’ ‘A few freckles won’t hurt me,’ says I. ‘I never was much of a beauty. But you’re the fool, to talk about sunburn in such a country as this.’ “I thought that settled the whole business; so I kept right along with a bare head, while the other boys, who were old hands at traveling in the north, kept covered up. The side of my face that was next to the sun was hot as fire, while the side that was in the shade was frozen pretty stiff; but as we kept tacking around hi" goinS from place to place, I showed first one side and then the other to the sun, and the freezing and qooking was pretty evenly divided. “You take and stick your head clear down to the chin in a. backet of scalding water, and keep it there for five minutes, and you’ll know what I felt like when I got back to the ship that night. My face was swelled up so that I couldn’t see out of my eyes, and one of the boys had to lead me around for three days. My head under my hair was so tender that I couldn’t touch it to a piller, and I took my sleep like I take my whisky, standing.” — Cincinnati Enquirer.