CHAPTER XXIV
My first impressions of the Arctic ice compared to Antarctic ice are distinctly disappointing, which reminds me of my friend Dr Bruce’s first impressions of the same. He had been in the Antarctic, then came up here to join the Jackson Harmsworth expedition. For several days they had been going through ice when he remarked: “I would rather like to see one of your polar icebergs.” “What!” they said, “you have passed a dozen of them in the last two days. Why, there is one now,” and they pointed to a piece of ice about seventy feet high, and about two hundred feet in length. Bruce was silent. I remember one of the first considerable bergs we saw in the South was over two hundred feet in height and more than nine miles long—we only saw one end of it! He had not quite realised that an Arctic berg was so small a thing compared to the majestic Antarctic bergs he had been familiar with off Graham’s Land, and in the Weddell Sea. When grounded and shoved up, the Antarctic bergs are sometimes several hundred feet in height, and have, we know from soundings, a total thickness of about one thousand feet.
As we sat looking at the rather gloomy view—grey sea and bits of bluish ice—one of us spotted a black speck away down to leeward and the first watch bolted for their rifles and we steamed down. Pop—pop—went the rifles, the mausers at about fifty yards. A lucky shot drew “first blood”—a small one-year-old hooded-seal. Great was the rejoicing in our little community, and we forgot the cold and dreary aspect, and dropped a boat and the seal was aboard and flinched in no time.
Then the writer turned in for one, also Archie, and the señors made merry with a tiny drop of whisky and soda, and were very well pleased. In my dreams I heard another shot and the engine stopped, and we crunched up against ice, so I knew another seal had gone to the happy hunting grounds; I showed a leg for half-a-minute, not more, it was shivering cold on deck.
Young Don Luis Velasquez had got the seal through the head, first blood for his split new rifle, telescope sight, etc.
On this almost mild morning of pigeon-grey sky, light and fine rain (8th July), we are passing through a wilderness of ice pans and small floes and the soft grey sky is reflected on the rippling lavender-coloured sea. The ice pans are mostly blue and white, like blue muslin overlaid with white, which shows almost emerald-green under the water. On the pans are fresh-water pools reflecting soft grey of sky, each pool surrounded by a rim of pale cobalt. So I wonder if there is any blue paper on board to paint on, with white body colour; that might secure the effect most rapidly. And on some of the floes are seals lying at rest, whilst others disport themselves as dolphins do in the sea, but we stop not for these, for the lavender sky is deep in colour away ahead, so we know there is more or less open water free of ice, possibly leaving a road for us to Greenland’s ice-bound strand. That is our object, slightly uncertain of attainment, as it depends on the drift of the polar ice from the North. In some years you can make the land easily—other years it is unattainable.
We keep a sharp look-out from the crow’s nest and bridge and deck for the blow of a whale; possibly we may spot a Nord Capper, or even the scarce Greenland Right Whale Balæna Mysticetus, and lift £1000 or so. We have tackle for them, but the finner whale on this trip we must leave alone, he is too monstrous strong. I have written about their capture in the first part of this book.
Here we may meet a large male polar bear, for they venture far afield. Nearer land we are likely to fall in with family parties, females and cubs. Where the seals are, there are the bears. It is a very curious thing about seals of the Antarctic sea as compared with these Arctic seals, that you very seldom see them in the South showing their heads above water; either they are under water or entirely out and up on the ice. I have seen many thousands there, and only remember seeing about a dozen heads above water in several months. And here again, or round our coasts, seals constantly show their heads above water. Another odd difference is that in the Southern Polar ice-seals make for the middle of the ice-sheet if they feel any alarm. They expect no harm to come to them on the ice. In fact, you can go up to them and touch them. Here they waddle off as fast as their flippers and caterpillar-like movements will take them, and get into the water for security, the reason being, that in the North they have bears and men and land animals to contend with, and neither man, bear, nor any other land animal exists down South. There the enemy is in the sea, the orca gladiator, the grampus killer, which has most awful jaws and teeth, to judge by the huge wounds one finds on the bodies of these very great seals.
All day we go under steam through the ice-floes, on each quarter a different effect—north-east there is dark cloud, with an ice-blink, a light streak on the clouds telling of a field of pack ice—ahead there is darker lilac sky, telling of open water, to our left and the south-west there is white ice and white sky, blending in a blur of soft light, so we know there is endless ice there. All of us, from the cabin boy on his first trip, enjoy the colouring, these exquisite blues and greens of the ice-tongues under water, and of the blues of the under-cut ice, reflected on lavender-tinted ripples. I eagerly make notes in colour, for my recollection of Antarctic ice tints is fading. Yes, blue paper would be the thing to paint on. Is it increase of years that makes me fail to see quite such great beauty here as in the South? I incline to think the colouring here is not quite so varied, possibly owing to the lesser variety of ice-forms. One might compare the simpler, flatter forms of the ice here and the fantastic shapes of the Antarctic, as the lowlands appear in contrast to the rocks and hills of the Highlands.
My first impression of Antarctic ice in the Weddell Sea was of bergs bigger than St Peter’s, miles in length, a hundred and fifty feet high, with lofty blue caves into which you could sail a ship, the sea bursting up their green depths from a huge glassy swell, around them small ice like ruined Greek temples, floating lightly as feathers, such marvellous forms! Here the ice is pretty, very pretty indeed, but there is nothing awesome or staggeringly wonderful in its design.
We steamed north-westerly all forenoon; a thin haze came down in the afternoon and the sun through the haze on the ice-floes gives quite a fairylike appearance, even to our somewhat rugged figures, when we scatter over the ice-floe, which we did, and enjoyed the feeling of land, as it were.—Bump! That would have upset an ink-bottle; now we lie still, up against a floe with the Fonix’s nose against the dazzling blue under-cut edge, and we throw the ice-anchor and wire-cable over the bows and hammer it into the ice. Later we towed her stern round and lay broadside to the floe and put out planks for a gangway, and filled up our water-tanks from a pale cobalt pond of fresh water. We broke a bottle of champagne at this point of our proceedings—and we all agreed it tasted rather better in the snow than down South, and we shot at the empty bottle, and practised lasso-throwing, getting our eye in against a rencontre with seal or bear. Our little white ship that seemed so insignificant down in Trömso now seems to rather dominate the ice and seascape—twenty people inside the little vessel, engines, harpoons, rifles, coals, heat and food, quite a concentrated little cosmos of life and human contrivances—our all, in this wide, empty Arctic world.
Later we pushed on and the mist obscured our path again, so we tied up against another floe, with shallow lakes of pale Reckitt’s blue on it. Far in towards its centre two seals lay on the snow, mere black dots, which I was about to go after, when, observing a smile on the face of Larsen, a typical blue-eyed hirsute Viking, I consulted with him and gathered it was “no use.” “Hole in de ice,” he said, “dey go intil!” Stupid beasts! I thought, there are points in favour of the great tame creatures of the Antarctic which one could approach and pat on the head before turning them into produce for patent leather, margarine, and olive oil.[15]
We had a pull of about a mile in the evening in our whale-boat—three double sculls—and attempted to approach four seals on the floe edge, but they dived into the water. A young member of the party came up and had a look at us, and Archie put a very pretty shot from the moving boat into its head at about ninety yards and we pulled it aboard before it had time to sink.
On the 9th July the air and mist were still southerly, and there was nothing doing except painting ice studies, firing at marks with our various rifles and pistols, shifting from one floe to another and drifting southerly at about twenty miles per day on the cold current, that brings the polar ice and water down past East Greenland to keep the people in the British Isles from becoming too slack. Our Spanish friends are brisk as can be in the cold and damp, busy all day stripping rifles, and pistols, and cameras, and putting them up again with great deftness and neatness of hand and clever nests of tools.
At aften-mad a tiny seal (Vitulina) put its innocent little face up astern, and Don Luis boldly seized Gisbert’s mannlicher and snapped a bullet into it; the telescope was sighted for a thousand yards at the time, but he got it all right.
Gisbert and the skipper in the afternoon overhauled plans for the Spanish Polar Expedition. I read some of the endless literature on the subject, and pray inwardly that I may not have to endure any more of either Arctic or Antarctic winter weather, it is the summer and the long daylight of either end of the world that I like. Heaven knows why the night was invented. The comfort of awakening at midnight to find the sun shining and no need for candles or matches is to me beyond words.
This day, the 10th July, has been more exciting—as I write we are circling round a great polar bear that has taken to the sea—we keep closing in between it and the ice-floes and it goes snorting along, horribly disgusted at being out-manœuvred. It is our third to-day! The mist lifted a little in the afternoon—it was charming colour as it lifted and faint blue appeared overhead, and the pools in the ice were most delicate yellow set in snow of faintest pink, each pool edged with emerald. Why the snow takes the delicate tints in northern high latitudes, may someone else explain. My devoir was to attempt its colour in paints, a much more difficult thing than circumventing this poor old yellow bear that I hear snuffing and puffing over the side. My companion, Don Luis V., writes his notes beside me, and runs out occasionally to see the bear that is waiting till the gun of the watch (Don José) comes off the floe; it is his turn to shoot. Don Luis got his first bear this afternoon. We were plodding along beside a fairly big and rugged floe, say a mile in length, with a seal or two on it, when someone spotted the pale yellow object far away on the violet-tinted snow, and as it was his watch, he and Gisbert and their men set out over the floe to stalk it.
The pale yellow coat of a beast on a white floe is less easily distinguished than, say, a man in a black coat, and top hat and umbrella. But unless one is colour-blind one cannot accept its colouring as protective. I must argue this out with my friend Dr Bruce when I return to town, for I see that in his charming and instructive book, “Polar Research” (which everyone should read who is the least interested in either Arctic or Antarctic regions), he thinks the tint of some piece of ice, coloured yellow by algæ, is so like the colour of a bear that seals may be misguided enough to mistake him for yellow ice. No, no. Bruin’s black nose and eyes you can see for miles, and so too you can distinguish his lemon-yellow coat, almost green in the shadow with the snow’s reflection.
As proof of even the bear’s belief to the contrary of this protective colouring theory, he will hold his yellow paws over his black nose, so I am told, when stalking a seal; and I can vouch myself that one endeavoured to hide both his black nose and yellow body when he stalked me.
Reloading Gun with Harpoon
Note the explosive point of the harpoon is not yet screwed on.
Towing Archie Hamilton’s Big Bear’s Skin
Hamilton and Gisbert are in the rear.
The most prominent thing on a floe, bar a bear, is a piece of brown ice, or yellow ice patch, the first coloured by land streams, the second coloured by sea algæ. You swing your glass round and round the horizon, with nothing to mark your direction on some days, when the sun is behind clouds, and keep time, and mark your place, by a yellow or brown patch. Therefore for a bear to resemble either is to court observation.
The next most interesting thing to stalking a bear, or being stalked by one, is to watch and criticise a stalk from the superior position of looker-on. It was the greatest fun imaginable to watch with the glass the little dots of figures, mere black specks, wandering over the distant floe. Of course, from your position on the bridge you can watch both the movements of the bear and the hunters, and sometimes their cross purposes make you laugh at the poor human mistakes. In this case the hunters came off best, but without the vessel the bear would have had the best of the competition. He got down wind of the group of hunters, Don Luis Velasquez, De Gisbert, and two men—sniffed the air and came hurtling along in the opposite direction and took to sea, half-a-mile from the Fonix, which we had anchored to the floe, and off it swam to a neighbouring island of ice, about half-a-mile away, so we up-sticked and headed it round till the hunters came off the floe in the boat, and the poor yellow fellow got first a bullet in the neck, which enraged it and changed the colour of the sea, then, after several more shots, a lucky one in the brain ended its charmed life. He may have left no friends, but he died without enemies to be afraid of, bar man—and we did not even find a flea on it; which was disappointing, but what was to be expected.
We think the Eskimos have met the bears here, owing to the bears’ retiring manners, which are not characteristics of these polar bears in less populous parts of the polar basin. It is not a fortunate ending to a stalk to have to shoot your game in the water. Still our friend fired several shots before he got the deadly one into the brain, but there is some excuse—a heavy tramp over snow-fields after a beast that, say what you will, takes a little nerve to approach for the first time, and then the bobbing boat might upset even a very experienced shot.
It was a great lift getting his body on board, we hooked the chain of the winch round its neck, let on steam, and up it came to the boom on the foremast, and hung dripping over the deck.
I will here quote a line or two from Scoresby’s book on Greenland. He was the wonderful combination of almost a self-made man, a recognised authority as a scientist and splendid whaler.
I make this quotation to give some weight to the serious side of polar bear hunting. Nowadays it is rather the fashion to minimise dangers on land or sea. And in the time of Scoresby it was also more or less the fashion, but he frankly says: “I do not try to minimise the risks of sea life and whaling,” and he gives due thanks to his Maker for many hair-breadth escapes which we to-day might put down too much to our own efforts and straight powder.
“When the bear is found in the water,” he continues, “crossing from one sheet of ice to another, it may generally be attacked with advantage; but when on the shore, or more especially when it is upon a large sheet of ice, covered with snow—on which the bear, supporting itself on the surface, with its extended paws, can travel with twice the speed of a man, who perhaps sinks to the knee at every step—it can seldom be assailed with either safety or success. Most of the fatal accidents that have occurred with bears have been the result of rencounters on the ice, or injudicious attacks made at such disadvantage.”
I am inclined to think that each person feels differently about approaching a bear on the ice; depending on temperament and age. Personally I feel a faint chill—such as you have before diving off a rock into the sea, and after success something of the glow you have after you come out. But I rather think that younger people have a similar sensation before and after, only stronger. In fact, so strong as at first to make them a little pale, to upset their aim, and afterwards to make them gloriously jubilant.
The naked feeling, I am sure, is there, clothes and ordinary surroundings are of no account, there is the snow, the sky, and the big bear hundreds of times more powerful than yourself—and there is your rifle. Before you dive into the sea, you know you can swim a stroke or two; before you wander over the floe to Bruin, you know all you have to trust to is your aim, and your rifle.
