This chapter will show that it is foolish to sit up late, and that it
does not do to shoot polar bears in pyjamas. Last night Hamilton and I
sat up fairly late playing vingt-et-un for matches. But the Dons and De
Gisbert sat up still later, almost all night, brewing a concoction of
seal-oil and things on the cabin stove for boots. Just as they succeeded,
it upset all over the shoulder of Don José junior’s coat. They were
very merry, but they should have been in bed, as it was their morning
watch at nine o’clock, and they went to bed not long before that hour.
Spaniards are quite reckless of the night hours, a few days’ stay in
Madrid will convince anyone of this—the people walk about all night. The
aforesaid brothers when they did turn in got into pyjamas—how people
cling to custom. Gisbert, being more experienced, of course turned in
all standing, as anyone of any polar experience always does. Now they
are sorry for these late hours and for sleeping in pyjamas, for result.
Soon after they had turned in, there appeared a very large she-bear and
two cubs close to the floe-edge, which could have been shot from the bow.
Just the chance they like, no horrid walking and stalking over snow.
Gisbert was ready in a minute, but they lost the precious time getting
out of the pyjamas into warm clothes, and the bear could not wait, and
perforce they had to follow her over the snow and a fog came down.
They have lost it; and here we are, a whole ship’s company, sleeping,
or doing nothing but grousing and counting the hours, as we lie on
dead-still water in dead-still fog—which is waste of time and patience
and is quite absurd, Q.E.D.
We are back to our last bear forest, “the woods are full of them,” as
Hamilton says; back to bear-hunting because there are no whales and
because our path west and south and north is barred with ice. Perhaps
by the middle of August there may be a road open to the land. We have
seen the mist on the hills, at any rate a wide stretch of many miles of
whitish light thrown up to the sky, which tells us that the land is there
and that we are not more than fifty or sixty miles distant from it.
We still hope to get the she-bear and the cubs; they are nice small cubs,
not like the well-grown wicked fellows we have on board; we could almost
make pets of these small fellows.
A man we know of got one a year or two ago. He was one of three
Norwegians left on a certain island in these latitudes—we will not give
its exact bearings—to collect skins during a winter. They got a hundred
bearskins and ninety white fox of considerable value, and they are there
still in barrels, and ought to be quite good yet. They lost their boat
and were picked up and taken home. They had a baby bear, which they
brought up on the bottle. It was a charming pet till about twelve months
old and then he had to be destroyed or he would have killed them in play.
I am sorry to say here that at _middag’s-mad_ we, aft the mainmast, had
not remembered this was Sunday till pancakes came on the table. As the
second lot arrived the steward stepped in rather quietly and whispered:
“A seal astern,” so we jumped out with the pistol (by what some might
call a lucky shot), hit it through the brain and it floated dead, and
a white ivory gull hung over it. It was just the kind of skin, too, I
wanted for the projected motoring coat. Then we realised it was Sunday,
and to make up leeway we displayed bunting, the Royal Spanish Yachting
Club and our Royal Eastern Yacht Club—the vice-commodore’s—and the Red
Lion of Scotland (the origin of which is buried in the mist of historical
obscurity) at the fore, quite a gallant display for such short notice.
With the flags’ first flutter the air went round to the north, and now,
instead of being heavy and depressing, there is a bracing feeling, and
the eye can see far and wide amongst the lanes of sea-water and the
floes of hummocky ice. Harp seals dash across the surface of the loch
we are in, as if they too enjoyed the change from damp, heavy air to the
keen, sharp, exhilarating air from the north. There is no use firing
at these harp seals in the water, for they always sink on being shot.
Besides, some of us think a shot might disturb the she-bear and family.
She went off to a floe about the size of Perthshire, and we follow round
northerly, and perhaps to-morrow morning we may sight her again.
One of the prettiest and rarest things in the world is to see a mother
bear with her cubs, the little yellow fellows with their black eyes and
noses jumping and rolling over their mother, pulling her ears, and the
old bear showing every sign of love for her offspring. Then to see the
old bear stalking a seal and the little ones sitting away behind, jogging
each other, making notes about their mother’s cleverness. Their education
takes two years. The smaller black bear of Newfoundland and America sends
away its young after one year’s teaching; there means of subsistence are
more simply obtained, there is so much wild fruit and so many roots and
other things for them to eat. But to stalk a seal up here on these flat
ice-floes, even with a rifle, takes very considerable skill. I speak
with feeling. For the bear to get within clinching distance must require
even greater experience. The polar bear has usually two and sometimes
three of a family, not oftener than once in two years. The mother is
frequently seen with only one cub and the father is then supposed to have
eaten the other. The male bear is said to take little or no interest in
the education of its young. Why the young, two or three year old bear we
first caught showed such interest in the old bear, Hamilton’s first bear,
I cannot quite understand, for though he kept half-a-mile to leeward he
always seemed to have an eye lifting for the old bear’s movements. I
wonder if he was waiting for the old fellow to kill something, then to
drop in on a neighbourly call about meal-time.
Alas, this journal is all bear as yet, and no whale to speak of; I have
never been in such lifeless water anywhere in regard to cetacean life.
And yet we should see various whales, the Balæna Mysticetus, called the
Right whale, bowhead or Greenland, the fat, slow, but valuable whale of
the old-fashioned whaling....
In the evening a bear was spotted. Gisbert and Don José and three men set
out after it. With the glasses we saw the bear disappear in the distance
and then the little black spots of straggling figures also disappeared.
They returned several hours later in the best of spirits, though they had
never seen the beast. They had fallen in with a curious experience. On
the floe they found a greeny blue grotto—I remember we saw them standing
on a high ridge, it must have been under this—into which they went, and
were amused at the ghastly silvery appearance of their hands and faces.
It was about fifteen yards long, and they could walk in upright, with
a blue shallow pool in the middle, and overhead part of the snow and
ice was thawed to about a thickness of a few inches and the blue light
shining through this with icicles hanging thick, gave an effect that can
be imagined. I think I would rather have seen that than have killed the
bear. There were no bears in the grotto; but I know of a man, Captain
Yule by name, of Dundee, who killed—well, I hardly like to say how many
bears, in such a cave. Take a blue cave, whity yellow bears with their
dark eyes and the sombre figure of the man, and rifle smoke, flame
and blood, and you have a picture fit for the cover of The Wide World
Magazine.
They had walked about ten kilometres over snow, rough going, and came
back about one A.M., wet, with ice on beards and moustaches, but glowing
and happy with the exercise. They had a hot grog, got off long boots
and were very comfortable, when another bear was spotted, and away they
went over the bow by the rope-ladder to the ice, chawing biscuits and
chocolate as they went. Don José being a little tired his cousin took his
place, and Gisbert went off merrily. Spaniards are very sporting so far
as I know them; they work up to their collars, always keep up a cheery
appearance, and—can’t they sleep after exercise—it is now past midday and
there is not a sign of any of them! There is a fresh breeze, but it is
foggy, with sun overhead, so we cannot do much.
To put in time I took a boat after a hooded-seal, which I spotted through
a lift in the sunny haze about a mile off on a small floe. We excuse
ourselves killing seals by thinking of the benefit we confer on our
fellow-men in the South by adding to the general store of material used
in the manufacture of margarine and olive oil; but besides this base
commercial consideration we have our captive bears to consider, they must
exist, to afford amusement and instruction some day in our Zoological
Park in Edinburgh, London, or Madrid. As I approached, the seal finally
shovelled himself off the snow into the sea and disappeared. Trusting to
its showing some curiosity, we waited, and it came up about a hundred
yards off, and showed part of its head, which I managed to hit, but it
disappeared. So we waited about the place, and by-and-by it came up only
about twenty yards away, when a shot from the pistol finished its pain.
In my experience it is a very rare thing for a seal to reappear after
being wounded or killed. I must disagree with Sir Ernest Shackleton in
this matter. He said in a lecture to our Royal Geographical Society
apropos of Antarctic seals: “As fast as we killed them, up they came
again.”
[Illustration]
It is a strange life this up North, a little while ago mist and cold, and
you longed to be home—wherever that might be—and now the sun is shining
hot, and you might be in a yacht off Aberdeen in summer; it is the same
crystalline atmosphere, with cold air, hot sun, but bracing—very nice
indeed! But up here there is some risk!—only two hours ago we were in
a tight place. No real old Arctic whaler would mention this; they all
minimise dangers—for their own comfort; if they did not, they would end
in staying on shore and going to the workhouse. But the writer, who is
only an amateur whaler who “only plays hide-and-seek with the sea,” as
a nephew of mine puts it, may be allowed to say that there was grave
danger, and putting aside whale and bear dangers, there was in this one
of our first really nice, sunny evenings, a very serious prospect of
our spending the last few months of our lives on a floe with a failing
commissariat. We ran ourselves on to a green ice tongue that we thought
had enough water over it to float us, and got fast. I was below, and
though accustomed to the ordinary shock of ramming ice, I knew at once,
by the long rise of our bows and the roll to port and starboard that we
were in a fix. Perhaps a small diagram may help to explain—so here you
see two floes meeting, bright sunshine, blue sky overhead, and rippling
blue water where there are open pools in the ice—a scene of perfect
summer peace. The two floes, each weighing millions of tons, are very
wide; they are slowly moving towards each other; they nearly meet; and
we mistakenly try to get between them before they close, and run our
stem and half our keel on to A, the submerged ice-foot of the floe B.
The floe C is coming towards us in the direction of B—well, to cut it
short, if the floes C and B meet, with the Fonix between them, our party,
thirty all told, have our little house squeezed, and when the floe opens
our home goes down and we get on to the floe till we are rescued by
some relief expedition, or we flicker out. But for having lots to do I
personally would have felt the necessity of a pipe or a dram—but as it
was the writer and two men and a boat had their hands full, getting out
an ice-anchor and wire-rope astern to D to kedge her off. The said hawser
burst and the artist showed the seamen the bend for a wire-rope, in a
hurry or at any time. Boy Scouts know it. Hamilton stood by at the wheel
and Svendsen and men shifted the cargo aft to take the weight off the
bow. An ice-tongue of floe C touched at D and gave us breathing-space
and by-and-by we kedged her off astern, just in time to avoid a squeeze,
and got through between the floes. One might write a chapter about our
manœuvres, but now the guitar is going and the skipper has thanked the
artist for handling that nasty rough, rusty wire hawser against time,
and expressed somewhat flattering surprise at his knowing how to make
a simple fisherman’s bend in a hurry; and again we are in open, quiet
waters and open ice, with a hundred yards between each floe, and everyone
frightfully cheerful. For some of us at least knew, though our Spanish
friends apparently did not, the grim possibilities. Also we are all the
better of the efforts in a small boat and the work of shifting cargo,
barrels of salt, etc. I guess and bet Svendsen will not take any more
unnecessary chances of dodging through too narrow lanes between this time
and the next.
By late _aften-mad_ we have quieted down, and have a beautiful display
of the bull ring. Chee Chee, our young Gordon setter (or collie; it’s
a little of both), does the bull, Don Luis Herrero de Velasquez does
our espada, and other bull-ring functionaries all to perfection, with a
foil for the espada and a sack for the Vueltu, this on our upper deck in
the ten o’clock P.M. sun, everyone applauding and the steward’s guitar
joining in below. His music is very cheap music, in such a contrast to
Gisbert’s old airs, half Spanish, half African, that go away down to the
depths.