CHAPTER XXIII
Now we come to notes about the Arctic regions, whales and bears, promised in the preface to this collection of spun yarn, as a sailor-man might call it. Long ago the writer, as a very small boy, vowed to go North and bring back bearskins. His instructress failed to excite his interest in short sentences, such as “The Cat ate the Rat,” so she gave him a little square green book by Ballantyne, called “Fast in the Ice,” and he at once made rapid progress, and he promised his instructress that he would go to Greenland some day and bring her white bearskins—now he has got them; but it is too late!
With this brief introduction we come to the subject of a little North Polar expedition we arranged this year (1913), six of us, to hunt for whales, musk oxen, walrus, seals and bears, or anything else of value in the way of heads or furs, which we could find.
I need not go into the financial aspect of the concern, but I may say my principal object was to study the Arctic regions as compared with the Antarctic and to make pictures of the northern ice, and animal life.
Dr W. S. Bruce, my companion of long ago in the Antarctic, came to see us off at the Waverley Station, and gave me a volume by that very remarkable Englishman, the whaler Scoresby, a scientist and whaler of the Arctic. That and Dr Bruce’s own splendid book of reference on the Antarctic and Arctic (“Polar Research”), and my friend Captain Trolle’s work on the Danish expedition to East Greenland, formed our Arctic library. Trolle’s description of the Danish expedition came in particularly well, as our intention was to visit the part of North-East Greenland, north and east of Shannon Island, which they charted in 1906-1908, and where, alas! they left their first leader, Captain Mylius Erichsen.
“We,” I had better say here, will often stand in these notes for my friend C. A. Hamilton of Cochno, and Dunmore, Stirlingshire, and myself; we have done a little whaling together, and he gave me his good company a few years ago through the rough and smooth of hunting black bear and caribou in the barrens of Newfoundland. The rest of our party were four Spaniards, one of whom, F. J. de Gisbert, made the bundabust for this voyage, chartered our diminutive whaler, at Trömso, provisioned her and arranged about captain and a Norwegian crew. De Gisbert is to lead the proposed Spanish National Polar Expedition, and is at present building his vessel, which ought to be second to none, as a floating oceanographical laboratory and ice-ship. It is to be a four or five years’ drift across the Polar basin east to west, somewhat after the manner of the Nansen expedition, benefiting from their work, and carrying out still further observations with a staff of Spanish naval scientists specially trained in the various branches of natural science in the high northern latitudes.
It is a long road to North-East Greenland by Trömso and the north of Norway, and so many people are familiar with the Norwegian coast that the reader may care to make one jump right north and join us on the Fonix, a few hours out from Trömso—to join our rather curious little party in the cabin of a very small whaler; so we will avoid wearisome detail in the latter part of this book about fitting out our vessel, such as those with which I have perhaps burdened the first part about our St Ebba.
So we raise the curtain in the cabin of the Fonix; De Gisbert and Archie Hamilton are at chess, whilst the writer and our young Spanish comarados, two brothers Herrero and their cousin, Don Herrero Velasquez, are playing cards, drawing, and speaking in French, English, and Spanish, separately or all at the same time.
To add to the vocabulary, Svendsen, our skipper, comes in with his collar up, from the cold outside, and taking Gisbert’s guitar trolls out Norse sea-songs. Three of us “touch” the guitar, and we also have bagpipes and a mouth-organ. It promises to be quite a homely and musical party.
The engine goes beautifully quietly—but we know from the wind and the low glass there must be a heavy sea outside the fiord, and we are heavily laden with coal on deck!
The evening passes with snatches of Spanish songs, and bits of sailors’ chanteys, and we have one bottle of rum between us all as a libation for a successful voyage and a “full ship.”
Then, alas, we strike the rough sea outside the fiord, and roll and pitch as only small whalers can. But still the three cousins trill away at songs, bravely, bravely, though they grow more pale. Then they retire one by one to their minute cabins; turn their keys and shut themselves in their bunks and hide discomfort. How they live without any air is a wonder—and after two days they turn up again, smiling.
A word here about our little whaler, the Fonix, and her build. She is just a handy size for dodging in and out amongst the ice, and she is said to be strong. She was built in 1884 for bottle-nose whaling, and for use in the ice—ninety-two tons register, two pole masts and a funnel, one hundred and forty horse-power, eight and a half knots in calm water, over all one hundred and ten feet, with broad beam, her sides are sheathed with greenheart and oak two feet thick; her ribs are eleven inches by twenty inches broad, with only five and a half inches to six inches between them at bows. The forefoot has a five-foot thickness of timber and the usual belts of iron round the stem or cut-water, to protect it when ramming ice.
Between 3rd and 6th July we are all seedy, there is no gainsaying it, the writer perhaps makes the best pretence not to be so, and is rather envied; and several of the crew are down, it is not nearly so bad though as last year on the St Ebba, where, out of a crew of fifteen seasoned hands, the skipper, first mate, and writer, were all that could stand a watch for three days after sailing. That was, however, in a pucca gale. Still, on the Fonix, we managed a game of chess or two between the appearance and disappearance of our señors, and worked a little at Spanish and strummed mandoline and guitar—Gisbert playing the mandoline, the writer accompanying him on the guitar, whilst all well enough joined in the words.
I was never with such a musical party. The steward also plays the guitar, and, with a wire arrangement attached to its neck, holds a melodeon or mouth-organ to his mouth and makes a very clever but horrible orchestral effect.
To-day, the 7th of July, Monday, we are into calmer water, grey sky and cold—we passed a little ice at night and met our first ivory gull, it is the harbinger of the North Polar regions, as the white petrel down South tells of the ice edge. Last night we drew lots for watches, Hamilton and I take ours together—we take the second six hours watch—Don José and his brother Don Luis[13] take the first six hours, and their cousin, Don Luis[14] and De Gisbert take the third; this arrangement allows us a change of six hours each day. The idea is that the two on watch are to risk their lives against any whale, bear or ferocious animal that may turn up on their watch. To cheer us up on this somewhat quiet evening, Gisbert yarned to us about his previous trips to the Arctic; and told us about some of the ice-protected vessels that lay round us in Trömso. One of them, the smallest, a mere twenty-tonner, with a crow’s nest at its short foremast, he told us, came back from the ice single-handed a year ago! Another, a yacht-like auxiliary schooner, with fiddle bows, but heavily protected, a year or two ago was up at the west ice—that is, east of Greenland—with a party of Germans. They became overdue and a search party in another small vessel set out, which called at Jan Mayen Island on the way north, but found no signs of the lost party; so they pursued their way north into the floes—hunted about till they burst their ship up, and only one man returned. On comparing dates the first party was found to have actually called on their return journey at Jan Mayen and left only twelve hours before the relief party called. A letter left at the hut on the island to this effect would have saved fifteen lives of the rescue party.
As we are going to the “West Ice,” north-east of Greenland, such stories give a sense of anticipated troubles to our little trip—if, however, one only thought of the dangers of life, who would go motoring or eat a fish or go to bed?
De Gisbert has picked up several stranded sealers, on his previous expeditions north; a lot of these set out in poor vessels with no equipment; for fur-hunting, for blue fox, bear and seal skins; and they often came to grief. A party of four wintered in Spitzbergen, badly provisioned, and when he fell in with them, one lay dead, a second was in the last stage of scurvy, and the other two were barely able to come on board and tell their tale. De Gisbert took the sick man and isolated him—and a distinguished doctor on board said he had not a chance of life, half his face was gone. He asked for beer, and the doctor said: “Give him as much as he likes to drink. He is a dead man.” So he got that light Norwegian ol, more and more of it; he drank one hundred and fifty-six bottles in five days, and recovered!
Another troublesome sealer he took home had gone crazy on board a small boat on its outward voyage. De Gisbert hails all sealers and gives them tobacco and their longitude and latitude, and possibly a bottle of whisky, all of which things they are generally quite without—as often as not they carry neither sextant nor chronometer. He was asked to take this man who had gone crazy back to Norway, and as Gisbert was on his way south, to save them their season’s sealing, he humanely did so. The man partially recovered and was let loose, and messed forward, in the fo’c’sle. But suddenly one day, at meal-time, he went mad again and cleared everyone out of the fo’c’sle with a knife in his hand; and they had to lasso him through the fo’c’sle skylight! Naturally they put into the first Norwegian village they came to up north and asked the police to take over the lunatic; but the police besought Gisbert to take him on to Hammerfest and they would telegraph and have him met there. He did so, much to his own loss of time, and at Hammerfest one small boy came off in a boat to take, single-handed, the raving lunatic, who required two strong men and a strait jacket: he died two days after.
De Gisbert talks of his plans for this coming Spanish Polar expedition and finds the writer a sympathetic listener, for have we not worried ourselves over similar troubles, the raising capital and planning of an expedition to the Far South?
We sight ice in the afternoon, and grey and cold it is—alas, that the thrill of the first sight of ice should not repeat itself. My young friends do not seem to be greatly impressed, not so much so as we were years ago, when, after a three months’ voyage, the mist rose and we had our first vision of the marvellous architecture of Antarctic ice.
Here it is not so impressive as in the South, but beyond doubt it can show its teeth quite effectively. Curiously it is often the old, experienced deep-sea sailor who feels the greatest sensation on going into the ice for the first time. All his life he has religiously avoided knocking up against anything in the way of ice or rocks, so when he is called to go straight in amongst ice-blocks it affects him more than it would a landsman. I know of such a captain and his first experience up here. When he had brought his ship into the ice, the crashing and thumping got on his nerves so that he retreated to his cabin, and bolted himself in, and had to be fed through the skylight for three days. This is a true bill.
We have got some sail set to a westerly breeze and go so steadily that we can vary our amusements of lasso-throwing, etc., etc., with fencing. The señors are interested in fencing but are not very good, but they are good shots at clay pigeons; that is another side-show we have, De Gisbert is quite a showman at it. With a five-shooter shot-gun he throws three clay pigeons up with the left hand and shoots them all before they reach the water. But at fencing the writer has rather a pull, the last three years’ practice in Edinburgh with our most perfect teacher, M. Leon Crosnier, ought to have some effect.
A Dead Bear Being Lifted on Board by Steam Winch and Chain
In Gisbert’s Spanish Polar expedition next year, or the year after, all men will fence for health’s sake. But who will instruct? that is the art—fencing without an instructor is hopeless.
A seal or two appear to-day and some little auks.
We get the lines and harpoons ready for our two bow whale-guns, and other harpoons and lines for walrus boats. “Chips,” the carpenter, is busy overhauling old oars, and making new oars.
So if all goes well we should soon be fast in a whale, or walrus, or up against a bear.
But we strike the ice rather far east, over two hundred miles from Greenland coast! Gisbert has tried before to get into Greenland to south and west of Jan Mayen; this time we hope to get in from farther north, about seventy-five degrees, and hope to strike Shannon Island or that neighbourhood. We have some slight hope of meeting Eskimos, and possibly musk oxen. Captain Trolle of the Danish navy was up here in 1906-1908, and charted the coast of North-East Greenland. He took command when the leader, Mylius Erichsen, lost his life in the interior. He says there is a hut on the island, one of these lonely dwellings visited by human beings once a century, generally under pressure of circumstance.
At afternoon café we overhaul cameras—like the rest of their outfit, the cameras of the Dons are of the best, as neat as can be: and we pull out all the books on recent polar work, which we and De Gisbert have between us, and discuss the writers we know.
Small floes are now on all sides, and mist. We run through one small stream of ice, shoving the pieces aside, leaving our green paint behind and some splinters on the jagged ice feet, and it is rather a sensation for my friends, their first experience of ice—then we heave to and drift. By-and-by we spot a hooded-seal and our first watch goes to the bows in the faint hope of getting a shot from board-ship, as we think the movement in the small boat would spoil their aim, and the seal understands and pops off the ice when we are eight hundred yards off; so we retire to the cabin and the stove; for it is beastly cold and damp, and write up journals and almost wonder if we are not rather fools to come so far for such disagreeable circumstances. Still in the back of our minds we remember what a difference a little sunlight makes in a polar scene.