[Illustration]
On the 15th of July we started looking for whale or bear in the mist
again, but with never a sign of either. So painting was the order of the
day for the writer, such a chance, no letters, no newspapers, nothing to
take one’s mind off looking at the effects of this end of the garden.
Hours flew, _middag mad_ of bear passed, painting still going, only
interrupted by expeditions forward, where our men were packing the bear
and seal skins in salt in barrels. Later we went ashore—_i.e._ on to
the blue floe—blue ice covered with white crystals, you might call it
snow. Three of our party and the dog, a young Gordon setter, wild with
joy at freedom of movement, they go off a mile or so over hard, smooth
surface, which grows more and more faint in the sunny haze and distance.
The surface on this particular floe was smooth and hard and easy to walk
on. In most places you see the light coming up as through a carpet of
white crystals on pale blue glass beneath your feet. Where there is a
little water it is quite blue, and where it is dry you shovel your feet
through loose white crystals on the top of the blue. So this is rather
different from Antarctic floes, which, as far as I can remember, were
covered with fresh snow, so the walking was generally more difficult than
here. Before I had seen northern floes my Dundee whaler companions used
to tell me how they often played football matches on the northern ice,
and I wondered!—now I understand. I also believe now what I doubted, that
whilst doing so one misty day, Dundee sealers against Newfoundlanders,
referee, silver whistle and all in great style, a bear intervened and
took their walrus bladder football; what a sweet picture in greys that
would make, the sailor-men bolting for the ship, their dark clothes look
so delicate and ethereal on the floe in this fine mist, and to see a
bear’s faint yellow coat in contrast!
Our party came back towing a drift pine stem which we had spotted far off
on the ice from the mast-head. Quite an important find in the wide world
of ice. They towed it to the ship with a lasso.
Gisbert and the writer did quite a lot of lasso practice, partly at a
stick set in ice, partly at our dog, as it ran to fetch a glove—great
sport for us, but the dog soon showed a desire to climb on board by
the rope ladder. As we cut off the ice-worn root with our ice axe we
discussed the possible journeyings of the pine stem; from its roots we
knew it had grown on rocky ground, from the rings, its slow growth and
age, and consequently of the climate it had survived in; from the known
currents and drifts we calculated it came from far-away eastwards, say
from the Lena river in Siberia. When tired of lassoing, De Gisbert showed
me something about splitting logs. I am not a great expert with an axe,
and he is rather, he cut his sea-boot soon almost through the leather
of the inside of the instep without cutting his foot. To show him what
I could do, with a mighty welt I split a log, and the axe glanced and
cut my instep through the sea-boot and two pairs of stockings. A chopped
tree and a chopped foot may not appear to have wide or deep interest
to anyone but the owner of the foot, and may not seem worthy of record
in such Arctic notes as these. But let us pause and consider, if there
is not something wonderful and almost inexplicable in this apparently
trifling incident. Here you have East meeting East, North meeting North!
A “gentleman of Scotland born” proceeds by a devious route from Edinburgh
via Hull to an ice-floe in the North Polar basin. And here, from some
unknown river in far Siberia, possibly the Lena, by the great polar
current, after possibly years of voyaging, comes this lonely barkless
pine stem, and they meet. And the gentleman chops the extremity of the
tree with the ship’s axe and his own extremity at the same time—namely
his left instep, as before mentioned. Does not this incident, though
trifling in itself, recall the divine words of the Immortal William:
“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we
will.” Perhaps, without any claim to originality, we may, under the
circumstances, be allowed to conclude, from the above combination of
circumstances, that the world is small.
So the snow had other red than the bear’s. Gisbert got his “first aid”
out within a second of the time I had got my own, he is very quick: but
the captain was first with his, and Archie administered a small tot of
medicine from three bens and three glens which he had brought in a little
flask all the way from Arthur Lodge, Edinburgh. It will be a sell if I
cannot go on one foot after the next bear or whale.
About these North Polar basin currents we have many interesting talks,
for De Gisbert has studied them for many years. He has asked me to
accompany the Spanish expedition in the vessel which will accompany his
Spanish Government ship as far as Cape Tsdieljulskin. This possibly
because as an artist he is so well content with trying to depict effects
of his “end of the garden,” most possibly because his, Gisbert’s, wife
and child are to go so far, and as she is a Campbell-Gibson she naturally
dotes on the bagpipes.
At night the mist cleared up a little and we made some miles to west,
pushing through floes. When we came to a blue fresh-water pool on one, we
again set to work and bailed our tanks full of fresh water.
Then on again, charging the floes with many a bump, which is rather
alarming to those of our party who are not salted to such shocks. We hope
the floes won’t close up behind us altogether, but when you enter the
pack, as the whalers say, “there’s no looking over the shoulder,” and one
must take risks in all occupations.
* * * * *
To-day we had a splendid bear chase, none the worse because our prey
escaped. The morning was exquisite, the mist rose and lay in lavender
wisps across the distance of the floes, and the sun shone and the sea
became a cheery glittering dark blue, and you could hardly keep your
eyes open when you came out of the cabin for the blaze of light. What
a change, everything sharp and clear, compared to the veiled misty ice
effects of last week!
[Illustration]
We were at breakfast and would have liked time for a pipe before the news
came: “An ice-bear!” and over the bows on to the floe by the rope ladder
five of us scrambled. The writer was armed with a heavy double 475, and
cartridges the size of asparagus, said to be unnecessarily heavy, but
Hamilton’s last monster bear took five of his 355 magnum, all in pretty
good places. It seems to me that a really big bear would be more surely
killed by a heavy 475 or 500.[16] Bad luck it was to have to travel with
a cut foot, and doubly bad at the very start to make a false step and go
head first into a hole in the floe, and to get wet through, with waders
full at the start. However, Archie cleverly caught the rifle and gave me
a hand out, and I got rid of some of the water in the way all anglers
are familiar with—that is, lying on your back and holding up your feet,
a few “tut tuts,” and we proceeded over hard snow, when we could get it,
wading blue shallows from time to time. Two of our seamen went flanking
about a mile out on to the floe and we beat up half-a-mile from sea-edge,
aiming at the place where we had seen the bears from the crow’s nest,
a female with two cubs. The chill of the early start, cold water and
the soreness of the foot wore off as we slowly covered mile after mile;
sometimes walking was merely a struggle, soft snow covering blocks of ice
with horrid pitfalls, other times over crisp, glittering, sunlit beds of
icicles set in blue, level as a mat, tumbling into glittering fragments
as we crunched across. But our trail was all in vain; from blocks and
hummocks we spied the plains and could not find our bears. They had made
a wide circuit, gone down wind, and got ours, I expect, and had gone
clean away, and as the floe was, say, twenty miles across and all over
hummocks, they were soon lost to sight, even from the mast-head.
Coming back at leisure we had more time to enjoy the warm sun and the
colouring. There were three distinct blues. Behind our little white ship
at the floe-edge the sea glittered deep blue, like Oxford blue; on the
floe between us and the ship there was spread a wide pond of shallow
water, lighter than Cambridge blue, and the pigeon-grey sky showed
patches of light peacock-blue.
A change of clothes, a redressed foot by Captain Svendsen—one of the
lightest handed surgeons I have met—and some bear-steak and we started
steaming round the floe, pretty sure of getting our glasses on to the
bears before many hours were past. For hours we watched with glasses
and telescope from the bridge and crow’s nest the passing white and
grey plains and snowy fantastic rock scenes till we almost slept with
the continual concentration of the eye on the moving white scene. But
alas, at five P.M., the mist came down again, so again we put our ship’s
nose against the ice-floe and we pray now that the mist may lift. The
skipper and Gisbert took advantage of this pause to make an Artificial
horizon with tar in a plate, and tried to find our position by same with
sun on the tar surface. But the tar congealed off the level, and after
calculations in decimals, yards in length, we find our position is two
hundred miles inside the north-east coast of Greenland!
Before midnight, with the sun still high above the horizon, the mist
lifted and again we go plodding round another huge floe. We cannot get
west yet, enormous floes bar our way, there is a narrow passage, say two
hundred yards wide, to west between two counties of ice, but it is too
narrow for us to venture through. Should the floes close we would be
imprisoned before we had time to retreat.
It is almost incredible, there is a feeling of movement to-day, the 17th
July, quite a perceptible sense of pitch and roll. You notice it even
without looking. The living movement of the sea—for ten days we have been
“in the ice,” with smooth water. How welcome is this open water. A clear
road lies before us to Greenland—why should the ice this year lie across
our track in such fields, making us take fifteen days for a distance we
expected to cover in four? Perhaps it was as well we met it; though there
were no whales there were at least bears, so we have their valuable skins
and seal blubber, and our two live bears to make up our cargo. They bring
rather an unpleasing aroma at times into the pure Arctic air. Their cages
are in parts becoming more and more thick, with stumps of the two-inch
battens, which they have eaten their way through. We begin to wonder
how to get one of them across from Trömso to Edinburgh, for it would be
awkward if they eat their way through on a passenger steamer. _Mem_: Keep
on practising lasso and throwing hitches and pistol practice.
At three this morning, twenty minutes to three to be exact, and in Don
José’s watch, we spotted a bear on the great floe we were hanging about
yesterday; a bear and two cubs, probably the bear of yesterday, and he
and Gisbert went off armed cap-à-pie, and the writer could not but be
amused at the old lady’s cleverness, though it was at the expense of our
companions. It was a mile away, but with a fine glass every movement
could be followed, and with no glass to aid its sight it could apparently
follow our movements. It stood up its full height, craned its neck to one
side or the other, then got on all-fours and spoke to its cubs, and they
set off up wind, then it turned round, took another spy at our friends,
who soon looked like little black dots amongst the waste of floe, ice
hummocks and pinnacles, little lakes and shallow valleys, and as they
pursued their way steadily to where the bears had been seen, it made a
wide sweep to their left and got away farther even than we could follow
it from the mast. I made a jotting from the telescope as per over page,
which gives an idea of the kind of going.
[Illustration: A POLAR BEAR]
I would know that long cunning female again, I believe, were I to meet
her, from the odd movements, from her “out-stretched neck and ever
watchful eye.” The cubs should be grateful for such a mother; without her
skill in character-reading, they would both be in little cages on board
here! Does it not make the reader comfortable to know that they are at
liberty, free to enjoy seal-killing and fat galore, and pure snow and air
and the Arctic world to roam in? When they would not follow fast enough
Mother Bear turned and spoke angrily, then finally went and spanked them.
A bear and a monkey are the only animals, excepting man, who spank their
young. So up here you see little domestic touches in bear life, which,
so far, you cannot get in a zoo. It is worth coming north to see such a
matron tending her young, to see the jolly round yellow cubs full of fun,
gambolling over the fine old mother, playing with her ears and head and
teeth that at half-a-bite could take a man’s head off like asparagus.
Here is a picture of such a group. “Rest after Play,” it should perhaps
be called. “True till Death” might be too harrowing.
[Illustration]
Sometimes fatal accidents occur in bear-hunting. I have heard of several,
but they are small in number compared to the number of bears shot. A
few years ago Gisbert witnessed one. Two Norwegian sealers came on an
ice-floe after two bears somewhere east of Spitzbergen, and they killed
one and set to work skinning it. The second bear was holding towards
Gisbert’s vessel, so one of the Norwegians hurried off to annex it by
himself, which is not a very safe thing to do. He pursued it some time
and wounded it, and the bear went for him, and his rifle jammed, and
when De Gisbert’s party came up a little while afterwards the man was in
ribbons.
Now I hope we may stop writing about bears and soon come in touch with
our older friends, the whales, of one kind or another. We are prepared
for Balean whales, or Nord Cappers, “the old kind,” I call them. But for
the big stronger Finners we are not prepared. I have written about these
in a previous chapter—about the special tackle required to master their
enormous strength. “Modern whales,” I call them, or Finners, the largest
animal that exists in this world, or ever has existed, up to one hundred
and twenty feet; longer than the prehistoric Diplodocus. The Balean whale
or Mysticetus that used to be fished here, and which has grown so scarce,
though it is generally depicted destroying boats, is a fat, leisurely
“fish” compared to these bigger and more active Finners, but alas, he is
now not only scarce but is also very shy and wary.
Forty-five miles we plod along, with northerly strong wind, and pass
two of what they call icebergs here—“ice chips” down South—a grey sky
ribbed like sea-sand overhead, with the light off snow land on the sky; a
yellowish cold glare to the westward; that is Greenland, and we at last
pull up against the land-floe. It is just the same as the big sea-floes
which we have been amongst, still it is against the land! Twenty-five
miles of it we guess; when the haze over it lifts we shall see
Greenland’s icy mountains. The days of heat and basking in the blooming
saxifrage and yellow poppies seem still far away. But patience—if you
wait for ever so long you sometimes get your heart’s desire.
The strong wind from north and west is cutting off bits of this land-floe
of all sizes, from a yard wide to a mile or two, and so taking them down
to cool our north temperate zone. I wish the process had begun sooner,
so that we now might be nearer land in shallow soundings looking for
walrus. I sincerely desire to see them, as I think my heavy ·475 would
have the chance of its life as against the smaller bore rifles we have
with us. You have to shoot them, then harpoon them before they sink;
when one is harpooned the others rally round and there is wild work.
Whales, musk oxen and walrus, coupled with a bee humming in the Greenland
meadows, is my desire. It is said there are mosquitoes, but for none of
the breed have I any desire, either little or big, from Bassein Creek or
Seringapatam. They do say, however, that the Greenland specimen does not
have any fever on its proboscis.
* * * * *
Whales at last in our night watch! I must write my notes about them
before I turn in. Some people say whaling is not sport. I differ from
them. It is the best sport I know. We had bear and whale in the same
basket to-night, first a cast for a whale which went off, and then
immediately after a shot at a bear which we got, and then another whale,
which we got also, both within two hours. Certainly though it was only a
narwhal the whale was the best sport.
We lie in a small bay the length of our small vessel, which is one
hundred and ten feet in length, and to our left hand there is a bigger
bay in the floe, about two hundred yards wide, and narwhals have appeared
in it. So we dropped our whale-boat with the harpoon-gun loaded and put
the line in order. This, of course, should have been all in order and
ready, so time was lost. Then we tumbled on board by the port chains and
rowed down to where the whales had last appeared; and waited for them to
come up again.
It blew a little with cold, fine snow. As we waited someone on board
shouted “A bear!” and we cast our eyes down wind to the ice-floe and got
a glimpse of pale primrose passing amongst hummocks; and very quickly
we got the harpoon out of the gun and backed down as fast as possible,
getting into a bit of a sea, and as we approached the floe I got two
475 shells into the rifle. As we came within fifty yards up came Bruin,
making towards us. It was very difficult to hold straight, for the sea
was breaking in foam and the boat was tossed about amongst chunks of
ice, so I held on and on, wishing to make sure—up and down we went, and
round went the muzzle of the rifle, but still the bear came on, as if he
wanted to board us. So lest he should change his mind and bolt, I let
loose at about eight yards and tried to hit the middle of its chest, but
I was a trifle off and hit the point of his starboard shoulder—with such
a heavy rifle and big ball and cartridge we would have expected to knock
him over, but it only turned it! The second barrel hit him a little high
and back of the shoulder, and he tumbled out of sight over a hummock. So
we made wild jumps on to broken ice in the foam and scrambled on to the
floe and over very rugged hummocks for a few yards, and put in a third
shot, which seemed to finish it, and Svendsen and two men hurried on to
get the body, for the ice was closing round us, but they found it still
breathing, so Gisbert and I, who were keeping the boat off the floe-edge,
backed in again, and with difficulty handed the rifle to Svendsen, who
put in another bullet, and with a rope the three dragged it over the snow
towards the boat. It was a mighty drag even for the distance of a hundred
yards. Then we backed in again through the surf at ice-edge and Svendsen
and the men struggled into the boat with the line, and we hurriedly
pulled and shoved off, for some heavy ice was closing round us, and got
out just in time, with the bear floating in tow. In the rough water clear
of ice, we managed, with another struggle and without upsetting, to pull
the bear on board and rowed back to the ship, greatly rejoicing! Just
as we got it heaved on board by the steam-winch, much to my relief, I
spotted the narwhals again and off we set, three pairs of oars rowing
hard, and as quickly as possible, the harpoon again in place.
I have been at the killing of much bigger whales, but this spotted
black-and-white fellow with the horn in his nose, plus the bear, was to
my mind as interesting a little hunt as any. Sometimes a rabbit stalk
is of more interest than that of a deer! A fine black-and-white-spotted
fellow showed with a great ivory unicorn, but out of shot. Then another,
more brown in colour, appeared, and Svendsen let drive. The harpoon shot
was excellent and very quick, away went the line, I do not know for how
many fathoms—we passed it aft and all hauled in and let out and hauled in
again, finally we came alongside the whale, with its circle of splashing
and foam, and it raised its tail, and we put in a big bullet from the
475, which went from its stem to its bow, and it collapsed instantly. It
was a surprisingly killing shot, for one bullet to kill the whale, and
yet the bear took three to stop it. We hove our line in short, and set
to work to tow the whale alongside and began to flense it—that is, to
strip the blubber off the carcass—and were all very pleased, and were
just drawing the harpoon from the gun, which we had reloaded, when again
whales appeared in our little ice bay. So we again threw our oilskins
into the boat and went off again. In our bay we waited twenty minutes
by the watch, and up one came again, a better one than our first was
leading: it was white, with black spots. Our first was brown, with white
markings. We very nearly got the harpoon into it, but it only showed for
a second or two each rise and it escaped. So more waiting in wet cold
wind, with a lot of bears’ blood, and snow and water under foot: but
this journey we had each a tot of aqua vite. So we waited and waited
again, just as you wait for a rising trout—only with a little more
subdued excitement and perhaps more than usual wet and cold: and again
the handsome beasts appeared, and we dashed after them, three pairs of
oars, but they went off under the floe and we waited again till endurance
ceased, and, very wet, and cold, and shivering, we got aboard for supper
at four in the morning. Three o’clock yesterday morning till four o’clock
this morning makes a longish day of experience. I would have given two
bears to have got the biggest narwhal with the splendid horn. Perhaps if
we had harpooned one of the baby whales of the family we might have got
the homed male, for narwhals, like sperm whales, stand by each other. Or
we might have had his great ivory tusk through our boat, as has happened
before. They have driven their spear through many inches of an oaken
keel. You can see such a keel in Bergen Museum.
[Illustration]
We cut up the narwhal and found it full of small cuttle-fish and
shrimps—the bear was full of lead. These great 475 cordite seemed to
have less effect than the higher velocity 250 mannlicher. I must try
them again, but I begin to be a convert to the smaller bores and high
velocity.
Now it is Archie’s turn for another bear, so I can retire to paint and
bring up my game-book with four bears and a whale to enter—two bears with
rifle, one with lasso, and one with pistol, and possibly the whale which
was partly killed by harpoon, partly by rifle.