Bright sun for once and away we have been steaming since early morning,
south and east, hoping to get clear of the great floes that bar our
way to the west. I long for mountains, the flat plains of ice-floe and
snow grow very wearisome. Now, near land, these land-floes are like
endless plaster ceiling that has dropped more or less in fragments. In
the Antarctic the floes look as if a Greek temple had come to bits and
lay floating on the sea. There is a considerable difference, therefore,
in appearance; at least I speak for the southern ice which I have met
south-east of Graham’s Land. There are no seals, therefore we hardly
expect bears, and there is never a sign of the blow of a whale. Only one
narwhal this morning, we almost ran into it. I wish it had driven its
spear into us, it seems the only hope of getting a good one.
Floes extend in a line for miles north and south; we think it will be
best now to wait for them to open, rather than to wander away south in
hopes of getting an opening round them. Shannon Island, on the north-east
of Greenland, is our aim.
... The floes are flatter, with fewer tombstones protruding from the
level white; it gets monotonous. Mist comes at night. Hamilton and
Gisbert play chess, Don José and the writer teach each other English and
Spanish. Don Luis plays patience and Don José Herrero does nothing, with
quiet dignity. This morning, after an hour at Spanish, I turned out first
of our party for breakfast and found our starboard bear also on the point
of coming out. It had its head and feet out and was only stopped by a
single rope, a mere accident, but it puzzled the bear—rope was new to it.
The she-cook and writer were the only people on deck. I tried to look
not afraid and she certainly looked perfectly cool, and kept on wiping a
dish, but went into the galley. I secured my revolver and told the man
on the bridge. I took the wheel, whilst he dashed below and called for
help, and there ensued a wild struggle; Bruin had lost a moment at the
last trifle, the silly rope that was slightly elastic giving way to his
pulling. Several of the crew turned up and got some thin wood battens,
but one after another, as they were hastily banged across the front, he
tore them to bits. And he has learned that shoving is also effective,
and six men this morning went back at first, to a shove of his two great
paws, till they got leverage. “With a long enough lever you can move the
world”—that is where our men came in. Now he has about eight inches of
timber in front of his nose. I will give him two days, not more, to get
through that. Gisbert says he is sure to go overboard at once if he comes
out. I think it is as well to have my pistol beside me at breakfast; we
must at least have a chance of some shooting if it takes charge of the
ship and does not go overboard as predicted.
[Illustration]
Gisbert tells at breakfast this touching little tale, possibly a
chestnut, above illustrated. “Once upon a time a hunter met a bear and
said: ‘Here comes my new fur coat,’ and the bear said: ‘Here comes
my breakfast,’ and both were right!” With such frivolity he soothes
our nerves. But the deep, vibrating note of Starboard and the sound
of industrious scraping keep one on edge for the rasping tearing that
comes when he really sets to work to get out. Some great chains have now
been found in the bottom of our little hold, and he is now really being
treated as a wild animal; the chains are being fastened all round the
woodwork, so I will allow him other two days to get free. All our wooden
battens are done or nearly done, therefore this resort to iron.
* * * * *
We—that is, De Gisbert and I—made a small discovery this morning in
rope-throwing—we practise it at odd times, with the prospect in view
of tackling other bears alive, which is perhaps even higher sport than
shooting or photographing them. For some time we have almost all been
able to cast the ordinary running loop at short range, but are erratic
with the half-hitch cast, such as you use after casting a loop over a
bear’s head to secure its forefoot.
[Illustration]
I do not write these details for bear-hunters, but the game is excellent
sport _per se_ on deck, say, on a P. & O. liner outward bound in August;
it would be splendid on any deck, better than deck quoits. It would be
excellent for a garden-party or sports for Boy Scouts.
You beg or borrow, from the bos’n or laundry-maid, five fathoms of
rope—log line is the best. Splice a metal eye to the end to make a loop
or lasso. Then you fix up a spar, with a cross-piece, and stand as in
this sketch, with the loop—larger than A, or to taste—and cast over B,
with right hand, and haul taut with left hand. The next thing is to cast
a half-hitch over C. You imagine B is a bear’s head and you wish to throw
a half-hitch over (C) a fore paw, so as to haul the paw up to the neck
and throw the bear. Then you can try left-hand or right-hand casting over
X, which is not so easy!
[Illustration]
To cast the first lasso loop (note position of hand and eye in loop A)
you swing the loop round the head and let fly and let the coils of line
in left hand go free. This is a little difficult at first; casting on the
half-hitch is much easier if you lay the line properly, as in Fig. (4).
If you lay it as we did at first, as in Figs. (1) and (2), the loop falls
short as in middle Fig. The idea is to have plenty line to your right, so
as to make a big flowing hitch, as shown in lower Fig. (4).
Gisbert and I worked out this discovery in the morning till we could
put on hitches every time, and in the afternoon we challenged the
“Professor,” as we call young Don José—because of his skill in throwing
the loop—and his cousin, Don Luis Velasquez, for a bottle of champagne,
and holding our hand, we easily beat them and felt very slightly ashamed
of ourselves for taking advantage of our small discovery of a knack.
This morning in sunny mist appeared a dot, far away over the snow, and
we put glasses on it and made out a seal. As our young men thoughtfully
hung back from a stalk, it was left for De Gisbert and the writer to make
the effort. Finally the writer started over very rough going, with very
little chance of getting within shot, still, just to show an example, we
felt one of us must try.
So we climbed over the bow and got on to the floe-edge and away from
ship. It was very charming on the floe amongst these ice tombstones
and ledges fringed with huge icicles that, in a wide view, are simply
monotonous white, but which all become very sweet and beautiful when you
are close to them and can examine the details at leisure. The only way
to see nature thoroughly is to have it rubbed into you. Who can see a
rainstorm with an umbrella up? When you have one leg in a hole in the
floe and the other on the floe, and hands, rifle and staff going, you do
not know how deep, there is plenty of time for the dripping icicles over
the blue ledge in front of you to impress themselves on your memory; and
for a time at least, the seal you are stalking, or even the bear that may
be stalking you, or when you think of the beauty in front, the cold in
your boots, become of little importance.
Then you toil on, dripping from nose and eyebrows just like the icicles,
for on this blessed day of days through these mist wreaths there is hot
sun and the ice-floe glitters gloriously. Everyone said that the seal
could not be approached. But by dint of much consideration and a crawl
here and there, I managed to get within a hundred and fifty or a hundred
and sixty yards. Then I thought, “Just to show what could be done by old
age and experience,” I’d try to get even closer—to a hundred yards—that
lost the seal for me; for when I got behind the tiny knob of ice I aimed
at the seal had got into its hole in the floe. For the last fifty yards I
was following the two or three days’ old track of a bear; I wonder if he
and I had both stalked the same seal with the same result.
A day’s stalk, or rather a few hours’ stalk, after a seal suits my taste,
and Hamilton agrees. He says, apropos of a big serious old bear-stalk:
“Give me a pheasant cover, with nothing on four legs bigger than a
spaniel.” You don’t then have that sensation of cold water: you are quite
comfortable and can claw down your birds and chat with any fair one who
has begged to see you do it.
From above, the careful reader may gather that we have at least in this
Greenland sea seen the sun. It is nice! Now, as I write, about twelve
o’clock midnight, it may be said to be shining; and in the rays, with
double winter clothing, it is really quite warm. But in the shade there
are many degrees of frost; that is why the icicles hang so beautifully
to-day over the blue ledges on the shaded side of the raised edges on the
floes.
It is a poor floe and feeble ice compared to that in the South. We passed
a berg this afternoon, an Arctic berg, so we said: “How grand!” But in my
mind I saw again the stupendous ice-cliffs of the South and their vast
green caves, into which you could pack a dozen such Arctic iceberg chips.
The atmosphere and colouring here remind me of the east coast of Scotland
in June, clear, crystalline, unenveloping, quite unlike the velvety
feeling of our west, towards the Gulf Stream, say down the Wigtownshire
coast, or the west of Spain.
I have often seen this scenery depicted in old whaling pictures, where
the ships and whalers look quite large in proportion to the ice-forms.
This is the difference between Arctic and Antarctic. In one, man and his
vessels dominate the scene, in the other the great forms of nature make
man and his works seem very small.
This afternoon with my pistol I shot an old female seal through the
brain—this after a futile stalk of hours for a seal in the morning with
long-range rifle and telescope sight.
Though we can’t find whales yet, the colour of the water is promising;
it is full of plankton: if you draw a muslin net through it you collect
in a few yards, in the tail of the bag, an almost transparent jelly—a
minute quantity of which, examined under the microscope, reveals
marvellous beauty, millions of minute crustaceans and diatoms that fill
you with wonder at the life in the seas, which infinitely surpasses in
multiplicity the life of the land or the air. These probably form the
food of the shrimps and little cuttle-fish, and the narwhals eat the
cuttle-fish.
The narwhal we caught the other day was full of small cuttle-fish, only
about a few inches across the spread of their tentacles, and it also
held red prawns or shrimps. But the cachalot or sperm whale of the warm
seas kills very large cuttle-fish. We dare not say up to what size. I
myself have only seen the sperm, after it has been harpooned, eject small
cuttle-fish, but large circular marks in their backs, something like
Burmese writing magnified, look as if they had been caused by the sucker
on the tentacles of enormous cuttle-fish, and wandering grooves over
their sides suggest that the parrot-like beak of the cuttle-fish has made
its mark. I have seen one of these at least thirty-five feet in length.
The contents of the stomach of many of the largest whales in the world,
Balænoptera Sibaldi (Blue) and Balænoptera Musculus (Finner), which are
killed nowadays, consist almost entirely of small shrimps, about one
quarter of the size of the common shrimp. On the landing and flensing
stage of Alexandra Company in Shetland, after several finner whales have
been cut up, I have seen piles of this shrimp food lying on the slip,
amounting to several tons in weight, with only, on rare occasions, a few
minute fish amongst it all.
The food of the whale that used to be more common up here, the Right
whale, Balæna Mysticetus, is about the size of barleycorns and looks
rather like sago with a brownish tint. The whale takes a mouthful of
these, plus water, and squeezes the water through the blades of whalebone
round the edge of its mouth, each of which has a fringe of hairs on
the inside. These hairs, interwoven, make a surface to the palate like
that of a cocoanut mat, which makes a perfect strainer. Then the whale
swallows the mass of minute crustaceans that is left on its tongue and
palate. The tongue is an immense floppy plum-coloured thing like a
deflated balloon. I would give much to know exactly how its nerves and
muscles act so as to work down the minute food from its palate into the
throat. Smaller Finner whales we know of, which feed on herring, round
the Shetlands and British coast, locally called Herring Hog, or Springer,
run to thirty feet or so. They are not hunted as yet by the modern whaler
as they are rather too small to be worth towing to the station, but no
doubt their day will come when our industries need them, and the large
whales become more shy and hard to capture.
[Illustration: Arctic and Antarctic Proportions]