“In the walk of this morning, which startled me with the change, I saw for the first time a seal upon the ice. This looks very summer-like. He was not accessible to our guns. To-day, for the first time too, the gulls were flying over the renovated water. Coming back we saw fresh bear tracks. How wonderful is the adaptation which enables a quadruped, to us associated inseparably with a land existence, thus to inhabit an ice-covered ocean. We are at least eighty miles from the nearest land, Cape Kater; and channels innumerable must intervene between us and terra firma. Yet this majestic animal, dependent upon his own predatory resources alone, and, defying cold as well as hunger, guided by a superb instinct, confides himself to these solitary, unstable ice-fields.
“Parry, in his adventurous Polar effort, found these animals at the most northern limit of recorded observation. Wrangell had them as companions on his first Asiatic journey over the Polar ocean. Navigators have found them also floating upon berg and floe far out in open sea; and here we have them in a region some seventy miles from the nearest stable ice. They have seldom, or, as far as my readings go, never—if we except Parry’s Spitzbergen experience—been seen so far from land. In the great majority of cases, they seem to have been accidentally caught and carried adrift on disengaged ice-floes. In this way they travel to Iceland; and it may have been so perhaps with the Spitzbergen instances. Others have been reported thirty miles from shore in this bay. I myself noticed them fifty miles from the Greenland coast last July.
“There is something very grand about this tawny savage; never leaving this utter destitution, this frigid inhospitableness—coupling in May, and bringing forth in Christmas time—a gestation carried on all of it below zero, more than half of it in Arctic darkness—living in perpetual snow, and dependent for life upon a never-ending activity—using the frozen water as a raft to traverse the open seas, that the water unfrozen may yield him the means of life. No time for hibernation has this Polar tiger: his life is one great winter.”
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PRIL 22. The past week has been one of dismantling, rubbish-creating, ship-cleaning torment. First, bull’s-eyes were inserted in the deck; and the black felt housing, so comfortable in the winter darkness, but that now shut out the sunlight like a great pall, was triced up fore and aft, remaining only amidships. Next, the Rescue, with her new bowsprit in, received her crew and officers. They slept on board last night for the first time, but still walk over the ice to their meals.
“When I saw the little brig through the darkness, on the afternoon of the 13th of January, moving slowly past us and losing herself in the gloom, while sounds like artillery mingled with the shrieking, howling, and crashing of the ice, as the great ridges rose and fell—and when the India-rubber boat was launched, and the men took their knapsacks, and old Brooks called out to us to get out of the way of the rigging, believing the brig about to topple over—I did not think there would be a spring-time for the Rescue.
“We are now in the midst of those intestine changes which characterize the house-cleanings at home. The disgusting lamps have done smoking, the hatches are allowed to look out at the sun, and the galley, with its perpetual odors, is banished to the hurricane-house on deck. That peculiar interspace between the coal and the ‘purser’s slops,’ so dark and full of head-bumping beams, exults in the full glare of day. What a wonderful hole we have been existing in! It, the half-deck, as it is called on board ship, is three feet six inches high, by fourteen feet long and seventeen broad. On it, forgetful of precedence and rank, our bedding separated from the loose planking by a canvas cot frame, slept Murdaugh, Vreeland, Brooks, De Haven, two cooks, and Dr. Kane. The last-named came on board last, and found, though he is not a very large man, a sufficiently narrow kennel between the companion-ladder and the dinner-table. Our clothing, as it now welcomed the sun, was black with lamp-soot; the beams above fringed, and festooned, and wreathed with the same. My bed-coverings, frozen over the feet in the winter, are bathed with inky water. But all this is to be removed to-day; and we go back to the luxuries of bunks, and daylight, and a long breath.