Word: siberias
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After youthful wanderings his odyssey started at Irkutsk where he was employed as a locksmith on the Trans-Siberian Railway. A chance meeting with two political prisoners who had escaped across northern Siberia made up Author Welzl's mind. That spring he bought a horse and cart, made tracks for the Arctic Ocean alone. Too uneducated to follow maps he followed his nose, and the rivers flowing north...
Wrecked off the U. S. Pacific Coast in 1924, on a return voyage from San Francisco to New Siberia, Trader Welzl, lacking identification papers, was deported to his homeland Czechoslovakia. He had never heard of the place. Long before the War he had left Moravia to wander far & wide. Returned there a Czech, he lectured, dictated reminiscences (made literate by others), collected money enough to return to his polar home...
...return from the whaling trip Traveler Welzl was disembarked, at his own request, on the barren island of New Siberia. He discovered a cave abandoned by Eskimos, dug himself in before the polar storms broke. The winter night descended, the cold stiffened the tossing waves flat. High winter tides exploded the whole ocean's frozen surface into the air, with thunderclaps, bellows, sea-qiiaking crashes. At those sounds many a polar settler has burst out of his cave, run yelling along the shore waving his arms, insane. Traveler Welzl never stirred outside his cave, where the temperature touched 86° below...
...those islands; but the summer influx of gold-miners and coal-miners must have wood. Trader Welzl wangled wood from whaling boats, finally imported provisions from Alaska. Soon he was rich enough to buy a $100,000 share in a trading boat. Tales of his adventures in New Siberia and elsewhere, an account of the Eskimos' extraordinary way of life, his own election, under the jaw-cracking title Moojok-Ojaak, as Chief of New Siberia, wind up his undreamed of, not incredible, romance of fact...
...years of drab post-Spanish-American War service led him to seek a career elsewhere. Why not be a prison guard? Friends suggested dog-catching instead, but he was serious. He passed the civil service examination, was ordered to report at Clinton Prison at Dannemora, then known as the Siberia of America. After a tedious, solitary trip he found himself one day standing on the deserted railroad platform, surrounded by dense forests, high mountains. The desolate atmosphere made his heart sink. When was the next train out? Luckily for U. S. penology, not until the next morning...