CHAPTER XXVII
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.