“Well, well, Nie; the fact is, we passed so pleasant an existence in the Sans Pareil, that time really glided away as if we had been in dreamland all the while. We sailed away to the far north in the early spring of the year. We didn’t go after either seals or whales; but we did have the sport for all that. Our captain was one of those real gentlemen that you do find now and then commanding ships in the Royal Navy. Easy-going and complacent, but a stickler for duty and service for all that. There wasn’t a man or officer in the ship who wouldn’t have risked his life at any moment to please him—ay, or laid it down in duty’s cause. Indeed, the men would any day do more for Captain Mann’s nod and smile, than they would do for any one else’s shouted word of command.
“We dredged our way up north to Greenland. It was a stormy spring. We often had to lie-to for a whole week together; but we were a jolly crew, and well-officered, and we had on board two civilians—Professor kind of chaps I think they were—and they were the life and soul of the whole ship. Whenever we could we took soundings, and hauled up mud and shingle and stuff from the bottom of the dark ocean, even when it was a mile deep and more. But when that mud was washed away, and the living specimens spread out and arranged on bits of jet-black paper, what wonders we did see, to be sure! Our Scotch doctor called them ‘ferlies’: he called everything wonderful a ‘ferlie.’ But these particular ferlies, Nie, took the shape of tiny wee shells of all the colours in the rainbow, and funny wee fishes, some not bigger than a pin-point. But, oh! the beauty, the more than loveliness of them! The roughest old son of a gun on board of us held up his hands in admiration when he saw them. We cruised all round Spitzbergen, and all down the edge of the eastern pack ice. We shot bears and foxes innumerable; walruses, narwhals, seals, and even whales fell to our guns; while the number of strange birds we bagged and set up would have filled a museum.
“Some of those walruses gave us fun, though. I remember once we fell amidst ice positively crowded with them. They seemed but little inclined to budge, either. Again and again we fought our way through them; but the number seemed to increase rather than diminish, till at last our fellows—we were two boats’ crews—were thoroughly exhausted, and fain to take to the boats. Was the battle ended then? I thought it was only just beginning, when I saw around us the water alive with fierce tusked heads evidently bent on avenging the slaughter of their comrades.
“Our good surgeon was as fond of sport as anyone ever I met, but he confessed that day he had quite enough of it. At one time the peril we were in was very great indeed. Several times the brutes had all but fastened their terrible tusks on the gunwale of our boat. Had they succeeded, we should have been capsized, and entirely at their mercy.
“The surgeon, with his great bone-crushing gun, loaded and fired as fast as ever fingers could; but still they kept coming.
“‘Ferlies’ll never cease,’ cried the worthy medico, blowing the brains clean out of one who had almost swamped the boat from the stern. Meanwhile it fared but badly with the other boat. The men were fighting with clubs and axes, their ammunition being entirely spent. One poor fellow was pierced through the arm by the tusk of a walrus and fairly dragged into the water, where he sank before he could be rescued.
“The ship herself bore down to our assistance at last, and such a rain of bullets was poured upon the devoted heads of those walruses that they were fain to dive below. The noise of this battle was something terrible; the shrieks of the cow walruses, and the grunting, groaning, and bellowing of the bulls, defy all attempts at description.
“What do you think,” continued Captain Roberts, “I have here in my pocket-book? Look; a sketch of a strangely fantastic little iceberg the doctor made half an hour after the battle. He was a strange man—partly sportsman, partly naturalist, poet, painter, all combined.”