“A poor bear, fired at last night by Mr. Carter, was found this morning, about three hundred yards from the ship, dead. He was wedged between two slabs of ice, and in his agony had rubbed his muzzle deep into the frozen snow. Twice he had stopped to lie down during his death-walk, marking each place with a large puddle of blood, which branched out over the floe like crimson-streaked marble. He measured eight feet four inches from tip to tip. I killed a fox; but missing his head, opened the large arteries of the neck, and spoiled his pelt. The temperature at the orifice of the ball was +92°. The crew were at work till eleven, leveling our rugged floe, and heaping up snow against the sides of the brig. The position of our vessel, high perched in air, and dipping head foremost in a way most Arctic and uncomfortable, makes the protection of snow very desirable. We feel the cold against her walls. The crew had an hour of sledging, as well by way of exercise as of preparation for their expected trials.
“A point supposed to be Cape Crawfurd bore, by compass, west. Our distance from the north shore is about five miles.”
I
EMPLOYED the dreary intervals of leisure that heralded our Christmas in tracing some Flemish portraitures of things about me. The scenes themselves had interest at the time for the parties who figured in them; and I believe that is reason enough, according to the practice of modern academics, for submitting them to the public eye. I copy them from my scrapbook, expurgating only a little.
“We have almost reached the solstice; and things are so quiet that I may as well, before I forget it, tell you something about the cold in its sensible effects, and the way in which as sensible people we met it.
“You will see, by turning to the early part of my journal, that the season we now look back upon as the perfection of summer contrast to this outrageous winter was in fact no summer at all. We had the young ice forming round us in Baffin’s Bay, and were measuring snow-falls, while you were sweating under your grass-cloth. Yet I remember it as a time of sunny recreation, when we shot bears upon the floes, and were scrambling merrily over glaciers and murdering rotges[D] in the bright glare of our day-midnight. Like a complaining brute, I thought it cold then—I, who am blistered if I touch a brass button or a ramrod without a woolen mitt.
[D] Little auk. Commonly spelled rotche.