"Cap'n George Fred" Himself

Edgartown, MA: Dukes County Historical Society, 1969. Reprint. Reprint of 1927/1928 copyrighted work. Hardcover. Very good in very good dust jacket. Signed by previous owner. Illustrated endpapers. DJ has slight wear and soiling. Minor edge siling.. Neyland, Harry. xv, [3], 295, 3 p. Includes illustrations. Occasional footnotes. George Fred Tilton, a Vineyarder who was famous for his daring attempt to rescue the crews of eight whaling ships that ended up frozen in the Arctic after staying too long in their pursuit of whales. The boats were breaking up, being trapped in the ice as supplies dwindled. Somebody had to come to the rescue. Tilton climbs snowy mountains so high that they can t even bring the sled dogs. At one point Tilton and his men jump onto an ice floe and hope that the wind would push them toward the other side, and not out to sea. When he reached the point between mainland Alaska and Kodiak Island they were faced with a 37-mile water crossing. With nothing but sleds, he needed a boat. He tore up his underwear and some leather strips to put in between the cracks, and crafted a boat out of the planks of the sleds. Yet this heroic journey of more than 1700 miles across snow and ice and water had little impact on the ships he was trying to save. The crews had found enough caribou to survive on and so the resupply ship merely allowed the ships that were still intact to hunt through the next season. In Tilton s later life, he moved to Chilmark, raced horses, and later became a modern day greeter a la Joe Louis, aboard a former whaling ship permanently docked in New Bedford. He regaled the crowds with stories of his long ago glory days of whaling and seafaring but never went back out to sea himself.