In July, resurrection comes to Herschel,—saxifrages, white anemones through the snow, the whoop of the mosquito-hawk, and the wild fox dodging among the dwarf-junipers and uncovered graves! And the Midnight Sun? It is not a continual blare of light for twenty-four hours. It sweeps through the midnight heavens, but between ten o'clock in the evening and four in the morning there is a sensible change. Colour tints and lines of demarcation on sea and ships are harder to distinguish, shadows less clearcut. Birds roost and even flowers close, Nature whispering to both that, if they would reproduce after their kind in the short Arctic summer, energies must be conserved. Surely the world holds nothing more beautiful than this Polar night, this compelling gloaming, the "cockshut light" of Francis Thompson. Here the evening and the morning sit together hand in hand, and, even as you watch, lead in the day, the new day born beneath the starless sky. The July sun stabs into activity our incongruous community. On board the vessels guns are cleaned, harpoons pointed, whale-boats caulked, and the winter deck-house is lifted off bodily. Up in the rigging fox-skins and all the year's fur-booty sweeten in the sunlight, and eagerly the spring "leads" in the ice are watched from hour to hour if a way be opened to trend out in the track of the big Bowhead.
Strange people crowd the fo'castle. Two years ago the ships bound for "Outside" got nipped in early ice and were forced to winter at Herschel all unprepared. Reduced to half-rations the crew got weak, and scurvy threatened. The Mounted Police (who by the way are "mounted" in imagination only, as there is nothing for the most gallant to stride here but Husky dogs), in making examination of the men below decks, got to their enquiries a technical reply that staggered them. One able-bodied seaman, busied with between-decks blubber, proved to be a medical man with degrees from two colleges. He subsequently made at the request of the Police a searching report on the state of health of the island community, adding suggestions for its improvement. The report was signed "T.H. Toynbee Wright, M.D.," and, after making it, the A.B., M.D. saluted, donned his oily overalls, and turned once more to the savoury spoils of the Bowhead. Which all goes to prove that in these latitudes "you never can tell."
Whale-men at Herschel give whales five names according to age and size: they are "suckers" under a year, "short-heads" as long as they are suckled, "stunts" at two years, "skull-fish" with baleen less than six feet long, and "size-fish" at the age when a boy reaches man's estate. A whale needs no re-incarnation theory of the theosophist, for he crowds enough experience into one sea-life to satisfy the fact-thirst of the greediest little Gradgrind. Fancy, thrashing the sea for a thousand years! A "sucker" who happened to be disporting round the British Isles when Alfred the Great was burning those historic cakes and prefiguring with candles the eight-hour day may still be chasing whale-brit round an Arctic iceberg. The whale mates, we are told, once and for keeps. Jogging along from one ocean end to another with the same wife for a thousand years without turning fluke to look at an affinity! Shades of Chicago and Pittsburg, hide your wings! Whales follow their annual migration as regularly as do moose and caribou on land, the seal and salmon in the Pacific. Seen first in May in Bering Strait, the Bowheads trend from here north and east, doubling back on their westward journey in July and August, when the Herschel Island whalers go out to intercept them. September sees the great mammals off Southern Kamchatka, and year by year with regularity they follow this Arctic orbit, edging farther in successive seasons to the north and east. The usual track of any family of whales may be left at a tangent on account of a furious storm, excessive cold, the want of food, the harassing of an enemy, or a change in the season of their amours.
A whale, for an old party, is not so slow. Alarmed while extended motionless at the surface of the sea, he can sink in five or six seconds beyond the reach of human enemies. His velocity along the surface horizontally, diving obliquely or perpendicularly, seems to be the same, a rate of from twelve to fourteen miles an hour. Now, to carry a whale of seventy-four tons through the Arctic at the rate of twelve miles an hour would require a (sea) horse-power of one hundred and forty-five. Captain Scoresby, a whale expert, by careful calculation estimates that a surface of two square miles of the Arctic Ocean contains 23,888,000,000,000,000 of the minute animalculae on which the Bowhead feeds, so we hope there is enough to go round. He quaintly elucidates this inconceivable number by explaining that eighty thousand persons would have been employed since Adam in counting these little medusae in the two square miles. Why any one should count them we fail to conceive and gladly accept Scoresby's figures.
The poet tells of shooting an arrow into the air and "long years afterwards in an oak he found the arrow still unbroke." Those who stick harpoons into whales and suffer the animal to get away start floating rumours (a sort of cyclometer of the sea) for their grandsons to read in blubbery history three generations after. England offered knighthood and a bag of sterling pounds to him who would discover a Northwest Passage connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific. M'Clure and the heirs of Sir John Franklin disputed the honour of this achievement. In the "North Sea" lived a whale who exhibited in his own person indubitable proof of having found that elusive Anian Strait. At Herald Island, due north of Bering Strait, in 1886, a whale was caught who carried round in his inside pocket of blubber the head of a harpoon marked Ansell Gibbs. The Ansell Gibbs was wrecked at Marble Island south of Chesterfield Inlet on Hudson Bay on October 13, 1871. Imagination sees opportunity in this for establishing hyperborean letter-service between lovers kept apart by cruel ice-floes. Eskimo Evangeline wandering under Northern Lights seeking Dusky Gabriel might find here a carrier-pigeon of utility. Is it not Pliny who gives us a delightful account of Hippo's enamoured dolphin?
Captain Kelly was the first to notice that whales sing One Sunday, while officers from three ships were "gamming" over their afternoon walrus-meat, Kelly dropped his glass with, "I hear a Bowhead!" There was much chaffing about "Kelly's band," but Kelly weighed anchor and went to find the band-wagon. Every sail followed his, and the result was the bagging of three whales. Among Bowheads, this sing-song is a call made by the leader of a school as he forces passage through Bering Sea to give notice to those who follow that the straits are clear of ice. Walruses and seals and all true mammals having lungs and living in the water have a bark that sounds weird enough coming up from hidden depths. Every look-out from a mast-head notices that, when one whale is struck, at the very impact of the harpoon the whole school is "gallied" or stampeded as they hear the death-song. The dying swan may not sing, but there is no doubt about the ante-mortem Valkyrie song of the whale. From the Bowhead the sound comes like the drawn-out "hoo-hoo-oo-oo-oo" of the hoot-owl. A whaler stops coiling his harpoon-line to tell you that "beginning on 'F' the cry may rise to 'A,' 'B,' or even 'C' before slipping back to 'F' again." He assures us that, "with the Humpback the tone is much finer, sounding across the water like the 'E' string of a violin."
Whalers themselves on this grim shore die without requiem. Every year men desert from the ships. They make their way across from Herschel to a mainland of whose geography they know nothing, thinking that once they strike the shore they can find railway trains which will take them to the gold-mines. One man, Morand, left his ship without sled or dogs. He carried only a gun, twenty rounds of ammunition, some cigarette papers and tobacco. In the spring they found him about a day's journey from the ship, frozen to death. He sat with his gun leaning against his left arm, and a cigarette in his mouth. Both feet and one hand were eaten off. He had fired off nine shots, probably as a signal which was never heard.
Breeding Grounds of the Seals