No whales yet, never a blow, no chance to use our harpoon-guns from the
ship’s bows or from the boats, so we keep their covers on. What patience
is needed for whaling! Two seasons ago a friend of mine, a captain of a
Dundee whaler, was up this north-east coast of Greenland with a big crew
for three months, and got only one whale and one bear. Then, with luck,
you may get several in one day, I have never yet seen more than three
killed in the twenty-four hours; but I have done nine months’ whaling
with three whalers and killed none! That is rather a record.
... The wind is easterly, the worst we could have for getting in to
North-East Greenland, for it is driving the floes inshore. We are once
more anchored to a floe and wait till the weather clears, for it is too
windy and misty to make good progress. We are still about seventy-five
degrees north and a hundred and thirty miles from the coast, and there is
an unusual amount of ice between us and it, so we may not reach it after
all.
* * * * *
Whales at last! Narwhals! the fellows with long ivory horns. The steward
spotted them first as he was cleaning a dish at the galley door; he came
running aft with a blush of excitement on his face, and we saw their
backs, three of them, and dashed for the whale-boat, but before we got
away the whales had disappeared! It was ever thus. They are the most
illusive whales. “A uni, a uni,” I have heard our Dundee whalers shout
down south in the Antarctic, and they too disappeared without scathe.
But are there narwhals in the South, you ask. Well, this is all I can
say, our men said they saw them. I did not. Their word “uni” stands for
unicorn or narwhal.
De Gisbert’s experience is similar; he has only killed females with
small horns or no horns. But with the beginner’s luck, a friend of his
in his first season in the Arctic—Count Thurn—got one with an immense
horn of splendid ivory; we must have patience then. Does the reader
know what they do with these horns? No one here can give a definite
opinion. Scoresby, the celebrated English Greenland whaler and scientific
observer, suggests that it may be used for killing fish for their food.
He found a portion of skate inside one, and as they have small mouths
and no teeth, he concluded the horn must have been used to kill the
skate. His undoubted ability and his education in science in Edinburgh
University give considerable weight to his conclusion.
The little excitement of narwhal-hunting broke the stillness of rather a
monotonous evening of mist and fine rain. Pretty enough, though, for a
little sunlight penetrates the mist, giving the snow the faintest warm
flesh tint, a pleasing contrast to the green and blue underside of the
snow blocks on the floe to which we are anchored. We can study these
delicate snow tints through our cabin door, as we sit at meals, always
hoping that a whale may blow in the still water, or a bear may cross
the delicate tints of the middle distance. Our language at table is in
Spanish, French, and Norwegian. Archie and I sometimes speak in our Doric
for a change. The talk is generally about whaling or hunting of various
kinds; here and there, east, west, north, south, Norway, Alaska, Bohemia,
Arctic or Antarctic, with a certain amount of more or less scientific
discussion about natural history and the elements. De Gisbert is the hub
or centre of the party; he drops from one language to the other with the
greatest ease. We talk a good deal about the coming Spanish National
Polar Scientific Expedition which he is to lead, and to which the writer
is asked to give a “Scotch escort” to a point with an unpronounceable
name east of the Lena river; no polar sprint this, but a serious effort
to read the inmost secrets of the North Polar basin, by every means
known to modern science. An attempt to find answers to all the riddles
put before mankind, the why and wherefore of tides, ocean currents,
temperature, colouring, electrical currents and air currents—information
about subjects we know a little of, and, possibly, secrets of nature not
yet dreamed of.
Then we turned in early for us, for last night’s damp and mist and the
quiet of the sea seemed to make us somnolent, so by twelve o’clock we
were mostly to bed, except the steward, whose galley is next my bunk. He
and the first mate and cook, a female cook we brought from Trömso, were
having a quiet concert. They made a group like a picture of the Dutch
school; the steward in half light, in a white jacket, trolling out an
air to the guitar, our jolly, beamy _vivandière_ and the mate sitting
opposite, almost (or as you may say, quite) on each other’s knees in the
tiny quarters, cups, dishes, and vegetables round them.
The steward, Pedersen, was pathetic to-day about the _vivandière_, he
noted a chip in a cup at breakfast and gazed at it mournfully and sighed:
“She is so mush too sdrong dis she-cook of ours.” She is strong, and
red-cheeked, it is true, and very beamy and has a laugh and a word for
everyone. She was one of the few who were not sick coming over from
Norway, and though so broad and strong, she nipped about between the seas
like an A.B., and laughed when the cold sea-water came up to her knees. I
back Norwegian she-cooks against the field.
I have written down what a tricky musician is this steward, he keeps
a music shop in Trömso in winter, his wife and kinderen look after it
in summer, when the midnight sun appears, then he attends princes and
humble people like ourselves, who go in search of whales, or adventures;
or scientific data to this “end of the garden,” where you have sun and
winter in midsummer, fog, snow, drifting ice-floes, sun, heat, cold,
huge energy, a great deal of beauty, and astounding repose. But why this
restfulness here? we all did at least eight to ten hours last night.
Neither the writer, nor De Gisbert, nor some others of our party ever do
so much at a spell down South. And at any time in the twenty-four hours
one can be awake or go to sleep with equal facility—appetites go up
wonderfully, we simply wade through bear steak. I noticed the smallest
of our Spanish friends, who would blush to face a whole egg in Madrid on
a July morning, calmly got outside four this morning, each with its slice
of bear; he has slept a good deal since. We consider that he is a pucca
shikari and also a born actor; it is pure joy to watch his movements of
hands and face and body as he and Gisbert jestingly argue out a subject.
He told us last night how the wine tasters in South Spain can throw a
glass of wine into the air in a thin stream, and catch it all in the
glass again as it falls. You see he is showing how it is done. He threw
up a glass of pontet canet, but instead of falling back into the glass
it all went down his neck and wrist. We laughed some, then he dried
himself and went on to show us something else, every now and then popping
his head out at the cabin door to see if anything was stirring on the
ice-floes.
[Illustration]
Some of my friends plan making a great sanatorium up in these latitudes
on claims which we have pegged out in Spitzbergen, so that people who
cling to life may go there to get rid of tubercular complaints. There
is not an atom of a germ there, so people with chest complaints recover
there on the land. But you can have persistent colds on board a vessel,
I suppose because of germs belonging to it. Some vessels seem to breed
a plentiful supply. I know a vessel that carries colds for all hands on
every trip. It is, I believe, somewhat similar with scurvy.
We got a very ugly brown shark this morning, one of those deep-sea Arctic
sharks (Squalus Borealis) that do not follow ships, but live away down
fifty fathoms deep and possibly eat cod. Why he came up it is hard to
say; possibly he scented seal. We welcomed him with a harpoon as he
swam alongside, and got a running bowline round his tail, and slung him
alongside, head down, till he nearly died. He was only ten feet eight
inches, a rough brown ugly beggar, not so fierce-looking or active as
those blue sharks we killed last year, off the Azores, for eating our
sperm-whale blubber. There is a Norwegian fishery for these sharks, for
the oil contained in their livers, which is used largely in commerce
as cod liver oil; chemically it is exactly the same. These sharks are
too big to pull on board the fishing-boats, so they are only hauled
alongside, when the liver is cut out and the stomach is blown up with
air, and stitched up; so they go off on the surface; if they went deep
down their relatives would eat them and neglect the Norwegians’ baits.
The vitality of this shark’s flesh tissue is remarkable. After this one
had lost its whole machinery, its flesh still lived, and after its head
was off, both flesh and head moved. A seal I shot this morning, after
rather an interesting stalk over soft snow and blue lakes, shot clean
through the brain, showed the heart beating a long time after.
I once wrote rather a lurid and perhaps too colourful a picture of
seal-killing, in the South, and the paragraph has been made use of by
people who will not eat flesh, but wear boots, and they showed how cruel
sealers were, and wished to stop them killing seals—honest fellows,
risking their lives in Antarctic ice and Newfoundland floes to keep
their wives and children in life at home. The seal may lose its brain
with a crashing shot and then its skin and fat for olive oil, or for our
chair-seats, shoes and salads, but that it feels pain after the shock, or
that the sealers are to blame, I deny.
Our port white bear at any rate approves of the seal and shark killing;
he hates the wooden cage, but doesn’t he swallow the seal’s blubber which
we squeeze between the battens, and he simply laps up the sharks’ foie
gras in heaps. He gave me such a scare this morning; I had forgotten his
presence and was counting the toes on a seal’s hind foot for pictorial
purposes and examining the formation of the dead bears’ heads quite close
to his cage, when he let out a roar within an inch of my ear. I confess
I was startled! He is only three to four years old, still he probably
weighs well over three hundred pounds and has a voice according.
[Illustration: ARCTIC SHARK, _Squalus Borealis_
_Photo by C. A. Hamilton_]
[Illustration: A MODERN STEAM WHALER
The harpoon has just struck a Whale. The Dolphins give a sense of
proportion of the Finner Whale.
_From an Oil Painting by the Author_]
To shoot a seal this morning I used De Gisbert’s telescope-sighted mauser
rifle, a new experience, the accuracy is marvellous and up here that is
necessary, as seals are wary. Down South you pat them on the head if you
like before you shoot; they do not mind your presence in the least. I
find wading stockings are perhaps better than sea-boots for these melting
floes, as you go sometimes over the knees, in the blue water pools and in
the soft snow. Also you can turn them inside out to dry, which you can’t
do to sea-boots.
The seal was fairly large and had three or four awful gashes, of a foot
or two in length, which were put down to either a bear’s teeth or claws.
It snows to-night—it is dead calm, broad daylight, but cold and no sun
visible, floes all round and our hopes are going down; we fear we may
never see Greenland’s icy mountains and the saxifrages and poppies that
I have set my heart on seeing. So we sat and sat in the silence and
made belief that time was passing all right, and quite enjoyed a small
excitement. A squeak—I would not call it a squeal—from our “too-strong
she-cook.” She was cutting up a piece of shark for our dinner, and
suddenly noticed that it responded to her touch—sentience of matter, you
may call it. I felt it was most unpleasing for some reason—it was quite
white flesh like halibut, and lay in a small block on the bulwark rail,
and when you touched it it gave a squirm or movement of say a quarter
to half an inch. We all collected round; and at supper we ate it, some
of us did—I did not—at least only the tiniest morsel. It began to feel
rather dull, so I suggested to Gisbert we should get the foils out and we
would fence on deck in the falling snow, and Archie would photograph us
and we would send the result to “Lescrime,” and we were just buttoning
up our leather jackets for the fray, when young Don Luis Velasquez put
his glass up at our cabin door and spotted a bear on a small floe not
three hundred yards away, eating seal. We thought it was probably the
sealskin and blubber of my morning’s seal, which we had let go adrift,
owing to the sores the bear’s claws had left on it, making it dangerous
for the hands engaged to skin it. _Pusey_ finger we called the wounds in
the Antarctic which we got from cutting up seals that had been torn by a
grampus. Though colds are rare in Arctic regions, and consumption is said
not to exist, yet often sores take long to heal; cuts on the hands, for
example, often take a long time to grow fresh skin.
So our quiet Sabbath evening became all excitement, and we dived for
rifle, pistol, and lasso; the lasso because we could see the bear was
not full grown, possibly a three-year-old, and we hoped we might get it
alive. As we raced down—four oars in the whale-boat—I endeavoured to get
some of the frozen stiffness out of the rope and got it into coils in the
bow, and before I had completely done so, we were down wind and near the
bear. It stared at us and made rather a sudden and alarming approach to
the floe-edge, as if it intended to come on board. I expected to lasso
it on the ice, but it plunged into the sea and came up within ten yards.
At the first throw the loop dropped neatly round its head and sank a
little, and a hard pull and a turn round the bollard or timber-head in
the bow made the bear fast. Cheers from the men and roars from the bear,
and Gisbert’s congratulations; he was surprised at such a cast from his
pupil. (But he was not half so surprised as I was.) It was very pretty
as it stood looking at our approach in the boat, faint yellow, darker
than snow; two black tashes for eyes, one for nose and two dark marks for
ears, and the red of the seal’s flesh and skin on the snow—very simple
colours, very delicate pale emerald-green and blue on the ice. When it
came running at us it was too picturesque! We towed it alongside the
ship, gnashing its teeth and roaring, where it swam about, expressing
its disgust, in language I dare not quote, at the rope round its neck
and its inability to tow the ship away. It may be too big and strong for
us to manage on board—probably measures eight feet from nose to heel and
is three to four years old; six-month cubs are what we can handle more
easily, and even at that age they are wonderfully strong. Gisbert told me
he lassoed a cub, and was throwing an extra hitch round its forearm, when
it got alongside him, put one hand on his chest, and he went down like
grass, and he is short and very strong, and is quite fourteen stone; he
got his arm rather badly bitten. All hands set to work to make another
strong timber cage, and they had it done almost before I had made a
picture of the bear as it looked at us approaching in the boat, and long
before Ursus showed any fatigue from swimming and roaring.
Then there was wild work in the boat getting the strop round its
waist—oaths and foam, and flying ropes—donkey-engine—roars from the
bear—shouts from the men—steam, and bear’s hot breath, all mixed up. But
out it came, only as strong perhaps as two or three wild horses, and
we managed to drop it into the top of the cage, hauling its head down
with the lasso rove through the bottom bars of the cage, and banged down
battens on top, with great eight-inch nails driven in, by six or seven
strong Vikings, Gisbert leading and having all they could do. Then we
cut the lasso and he was free of the loop in a second or two. So we have
two live bears now, possibly polar cousins. The first is to port, the
second to starboard of main-hatch, and their deep voices give a strong
accompaniment to our progression. They have no qualms about eating;
they tear the timber of their cage and eat seal’s fat from our hand
alternately.
It is my early watch to-day, three A.M. to nine A.M., till welcome
coffee-time. There is nothing doing, no whale’s spout and no bears
appear. Still one never knows, so Olaus paces the foredeck with his hands
deep in his pockets and Larsen works away quietly at the bear meat,
taking off every bit of the fat, so that it will be good for our table.
I write in our little chart-room on the bridge, with a view all round of
floes of ice extending right round the horizon; we are anchored to one—in
its shelter. The wind is falling and it is very quiet; there is the lap,
lap of the small waves against the green edge of the floe, the tweet,
tweet of some ivory gulls, and the homely barn-door-fowl-like cluck,
cluck of the fulmar petrels, as they squabble and splutter under the
stern for scraps of food, not forgetting the frequent low, deep growls
of the bear we lassoed last night. His companion, our first capture, is
asleep, possibly dreaming that it is free, poor fellow! So I study my
immediate surroundings without interruption. A flight of ivory gulls
has just come and has lit beside us on the floe. They are white as this
paper and yet not quite so white as snow; they have dark beaks and feet
and black eyes, so what you see when they stand in order on the pinkish
white snow is a series of almost invisibly yellowish white upright sort
of sea-birds, which you would not notice at all, but for their dark legs
and eyes and bills.
If there happens to be one of the pale blue ice ponds just beyond them,
then you see them white against it distinctly, and the blue is reflected
under their bodies as they stand beside the pool, or when they rise and
flit over it it shines under their wings. They always stand bills up
wind, as if they had come from somewhere and expected something, but
are not particularly anxious about it. They do not seem to be excited
about the flesh we throw into the snow at this early hour; later they
all start to eat it at once. The fulmars seem to eat all the time. These
yellowish white birds with chalky-grey and brown wings are always with
us, round our stern, battling ever about scraps of seals’ blubber; there
is quite a homely farm-door sound about their cluck, cluck. Seamen say
they are reincarnated souls of men lost at sea—rather a far-fetched idea,
to my mind. Then there comes a Richardson’s skua. We need a specimen for
Edinburgh Museum, so I drop it on the floe with no compunction; it is
the sea-birds’ pirate and has a touch of the cuckoo’s plumage under its
wings. It neither reaps nor sows, simply lives by cheek. When a simple
fulmar has filled itself with what it can get, fish or fowls or little
cuttle-fish and minute shrimps, by dint of hard work and early rising,
then by comes Mr Skua of quick flight, and ingeniously attacks the fulmar
from behind and underneath, till it disgorges its breakfast and the skua
catches it up before it reaches the water!
Though our ice-scape is very remote and far afield, and subdued in sound
and in colour, there is a great deal going on. At the floe-edge there
are reddish shrimps in the clear cold water, and if you take some of the
water in a glass, you will see still more minute crustaceans, a joy of
delicate coloured armour under the microscope. And there is inorganic
life amongst the ice; a blue block has just come sweeping past very
slowly—it is like blue and white muslin. But big life, bar our three
selves on deck this morning, there seems to be none. All the rest of
our crowd are sound asleep below decks. I think they should be up and
doing, for the sky is lifting and the snow ceased and there is more and
more animation amongst our bird neighbours. The ivory gulls find it is
breakfast-time and suddenly set to work, pecking at pieces of meat they
barely glanced at an hour ago. There is a promise of movement—possibly
of our finding a way through the purple leads, through these sheets
of ice-floes to Greenland in the west. Yes, there is more colour now,
the white night is changing almost unnoticeably, and the ivory gulls
begin to call before they take another flight (they speak just like our
sea-swallows or terns, a tweet, tweet). On first seeing an ivory gull
you are not greatly impressed; it is simply an entirely white gull.
But you recall Arctic travellers mentioning it, and the little pause
they make after its name; and when you see them yourself you realise
what that means ... that little creamy white body that reflects the
grey of the sea under its wing, or the blue in the pool on ice-floes,
its inconsequent floating white flight is the very soul of the Arctic.
As closely associated with the ice-edge there is another white bird
in the Antarctic, the snowy petrel, a delicate white spirit bird, a
never-to-be-forgotten touch of white delicacy in the almost awful beauty
of the Antarctic floe-edge, a small bird, white and soft as a snow-flake,
flitting amongst white and Doric ruins on the edge of a lonely sea. Here
the white counterpart is a larger, a more material creature on the edge
of a shallower, less impressive ice-pack, but the kinship is there.
How I wish it was breakfast-time! two more hours before our “much too
strong she-cook” will give us _frokost_.
At this point in these meditations we came across another bear; we had
let go our floe and were heading north-west, the day clearing (bump! that
was ice), when we spotted him on a small floe, across which he sped at a
good speed. At first we thought it was small enough to take with lasso
and keep alive, so we chased it, but it proved on close acquaintance to
be an old she-bear, and far too big and strong to rope, so we dispatched
it with my 38 Colt pistol with one shot in the centre of its white head
at ten yards, which killed it stone dead, much to the astonishment of
crew, who had no idea of what a pistol can do. Not an hour later, still
before the longed-for breakfast, we spotted a big bear on a floe to
windward, just five minutes after our watch was up, so it came in the
watch of Don Luis Velasquez, who came on at nine o’clock.
It was fascinating, watching the great beast with the glass as it
sauntered to and fro on the floe, a seal lay on the floe not far out of
the line from windward, and we fondly hoped to see the bear stalk it, but
before it quite crossed the line of scent, and when not a hundred yards
from the seal, he evidently thought he would like forty winks, so he
shovelled himself a lair in the snow and turned in, but it was not quite
to his liking, so he got up and looked towards us, and either did not see
our rigging or did not mind it and lay down again, so that we only saw
his great yellowish back above a snow ridge. So Gisbert and Don Luis had
time for a tiny whisky-and-soda, but no breakfast, and set out with a
large camp-following, and we others went on with coffee and bear-steak,
and at our leisure went to the bridge and watched their long walk over
snow ridges and wreaths and blue-water pools. The ice-bear looked up
when they were about two hundred yards distant and began to come towards
them, then thought there were too many, and retired. He was pretty well
peppered by both rifles before he gave in, fifteen to twenty-five shots
we heard—the account varies, but he was hit several times. When you are
by yourself, or with only another man, the bear will face you and come
to the attack, so you get a better chance than when it is inclined to
retire, as it did in this case. This was another male of large size. I
made a jotting of him before he yawned and lay down to sleep, he probably
had breakfasted—at least he did not notice the seal distant from him
about twenty yards.
There is much bumping to-day—floes are heavy and close and we have to
charge some which makes the splinters fly from our sheathing of hard
wood. It seems more hopeless than ever to reach the North Greenland
coast. The floes are so large and numerous, we fear that even did we do
so, a little easterly wind might hem us in on the coast against land
ice, where we might have to stay indefinitely. Still, two days may alter
the aspect of ice entirely: Svendsen details all this to us with the
stump of a pencil on the white wood of our new captive’s cage to which
he puts his black nose and ivory teeth and crushes splinters, now and
then using his claws. He must know us all now, but they naturally are not
very friendly yet and the deep, musical vibration of their growls coming
right aft from the waist, sound sometimes a little like curses “not loud
but deep.” We can stand that, but when the note changes to something like
“For the Lord’s sake let me out,” to freedom and the wide floe, we have
to harden our hearts and think of little children at home.
At lunch we talk bear and other sport and Arctic cachés. The last a
subject that is fascinating. The first I ever heard of was from one of
Leigh Smith’s men of the Eira. We were in the tropics, he was steering
when he spoke of it, with longing. He had wintered with Leigh Smith in
Franz Josef Land before that part became popular, and as he steered he
told me how, before leaving for their forty days’ voyage in an open boat
to Norway (they had lost their ship in an ice squeeze), they buried
the spare rifles, musical instruments, and champagne. How one’s teeth
watered as we heard of these “beakers, cooled a long age in the deep
delved” snow, and little did my companion Bruce or I ever think we would
be near that caché; but five years later Bruce was up there, and found
the rifles, musical-boxes and champagne bottles were there, just as
described, but alas the bottles were burst! Gisbert tells me he also saw
the same caché ten years later, and he knows of a finer one still, still
untouched by the A⸺ Z⸺ expedition. It is also in Franz Josef Land—a cave
in rock, blasted out, and covered with a timber door so thick that not
all the polar bears in the Arctic, good carpenters as they are, could
open it. That is the Duke d’Abruzzi’s caché, and there are others; one,
I think, on Shannon Island, which we aim at getting to and which we will
add to, if not in need of provisions, and draw on if we are in distress.
The idea is to add to such a store if you can, for the benefit of anyone
really in need. It is a wicked thing, however, to draw on a caché,
excepting in case of being in want of the necessaries for existence. I
have had one pilfered in the barrens of Newfoundland of tea and sugar,
raisins, chocolate and such luxuries, the necessaries, flour and hard
tack, being left untouched. Were the man found who did this, his life
would be made a burden to him through the breadth of Newfoundland.
But to come back to our ice-bears. I have lately, and at other times,
heard many stories about them, and the more I see of them the more do
I believe about their strength, and timidity, their fierce courage,
and docility. One bear does one thing, the next the opposite. One dies
with two or three bullets whilst running away, the next eats them up,
advancing to the attack.
Gisbert’s closest contact, bar the occasion before mentioned with the
young bear, was quite exciting and unexpected. He left the ship one day
to verify the height of a mountain in Franz Josef Land, which he had
previously calculated from sea—went up a steep ice-fall with ski in
tow and got to near the top, when a fierce gale, with snow, started.
Following the bear’s plan, he looked for a hole to slip into, found such
a shelter, and crawled in. By the faint blue light coming through the ice
roof and sides of the cave he discovered a great bear, with its black
nose resting on its folded paws and its dark eyes looking at him with a
kindly expression. He did not trust the expression, but, keeping his eyes
steadily on the bear’s, he gently pulled his rifle forward, and without
lifting it, with his thumb pushed back the safety bolt, and slowly
brought forward the muzzle to the bear’s ear and pulled, and so Gisbert
lived to tell the tale. It sounds a moderately tall story, but after many
others I have heard, and even from what I have seen lately, it does not
sound so wonderful as it may to one who has not been at “this end of the
garden.” When the gale blew over, some of the crew came up to his signal,
and three all told, slid down the slope on the white bear’s body, at the
foot it was, of course, deprived of its skin; when you think of it, the
whole proceeding seems rather hard on the bear.
[Illustration: FULMAR PETRELS
_Photo by C. A. Hamilton_]
[Illustration: “STARBOARD” BEING HOISTED ON BOARD BY STEAM WINCH]
Another bear yarn I heard from my friend Henriksen, whom I have written
about in previous chapters on our whaler the St Ebba. His father used
to go north, and once took a farm hand from his home in the island
of Nottero. Hansen was no sailor, and was a little weak-minded, but
enormously strong physically. In the fo’c’sle, the crew made him their
butt, till one morning he rose in his simple wrath and threw the crew
out separately up the scuttle on to the deck when they should have been
at dinner, and kept them out till they pleaded for mercy. Shortly after
he became their hero, for one day whilst they were all away on the ice
sealing they were signalled to, to return to the ship, for the ice was
breaking up, and all hands made a long run round an opening lane to
get aboard, but big Hansen hooked a piece of floating ice and started
navigating himself across, paddling with his ice pick, and he was not
in the least put out when he observed a big bear awaiting his landing.
But the bear seemed impatient and shoved off to meet him half-way, and
Hansen quietly waited and dealt it a mighty blow with his pick into the
brain as it came alongside, and killed it, then towed it along with him,
skinned it, and came to the ship with its head and skin over his head and
shoulders, very bloody but very pleased.
[Illustration]
Last night we were fog-stayed, we could not get ahead a thin fog with
the midnight sun shining through. We had many small things to occupy
ourselves with, but every five minutes some of us were out at the cabin
door to look at the view. Only a plain of snow fading in violet ridges
into the mist, with very few features, but the delicacy of the colour
you hardly notice at first, day after day grows on you, and if you try
to paint it, it grows more quickly, and you realise the difficulty of
trying to reproduce Nature’s highest quiet notes. It was our watch till
three—that is, Archie’s and mine—but the others stayed up, though there
was little chance of seeing a bear. So inside the cabin we piled coal on
to the small stove and blew smokes, and it was warm, distinctly cosy,
and the guitar thrummed, and several of us hummed and wrote and smoked,
and then went out into the cold, frosty air and looked at the colour,
the fantasy of ice form and colour and the icicles hanging from scanty
rigging, and came back to the cabin and vainly tried to find words to
express appreciation of the beauty of the white scenery.
So we stayed up till the end of our watch, then Archie and I turned in,
very sleepy, and our Spanish friends stood their watch as well, till
nine. They never seem to turn a hair for want of sleep.