Seal-Stalking—A Glorious Day’s Sport—Piper Peter and the Bear—A Strange Duet—The Seal-Stalkers’ Return.
It was about midnight on the 24th of April when the seals were sighted. Midnight, and the sun was low down on the horizon, but, for three long months, never more would it set or sink behind the sea of ice. The weather was bright, bracing, beautiful. Not a cloud in the sky, and hardly wind enough to let the ships get well in through the pack, towards the place where the seals lay as thick as bees, and all unconscious of their approaching fate. But the Arrandoon got steam up, and commenced forcing her way through the closely packed yet loosely floating bergs, leaving behind her a wake of clear water, which made it easy work for the Scotia and the saucy little “two-stick yacht” to follow her example.
My young reader must dismiss from his mind the idea of tall, mountainous, pinnacled icebergs, like those he sees in common engravings. The ice was in heavy pieces, it is true, from forty to sixty or seventy feet square, and probably six feet out of water, with hummocks here and there, and piles of bay ice that looked like packs of gigantic cards, but so flat and low upon the whole, that from the masthead a stretch of snow-clad ice could be seen, spreading westwards and north for many and many a mile.
When even the power of steam failed to force the Arrandoon farther into the pack, the ships were stopped, fires were banked and sails were clewed, and all hands prepared for instant action. The men girt their knives and steels around them, and threw their “Jowrie-tows” across their broad shoulders, and the officers, dressed in their sealing costume, seized their rifles and shot-belts.
Next moment the bo’s’n’s shrill pipe sounded out in the still air, and the order was shouted,—
“All hands over the side.”
In five minutes more the ships were apparently deserted. You wouldn’t have heard a sound on board, for few were left but stewards and cooks; while little boy Freezing Powders and his wonderful cockatoo had it all to themselves down in the saloon of the great steamship. The boy was bending down beside his favourite in the corner.
“What’s the row? What’s the row? What’s the row?” the bird was saying.
“I don’t know nuffin’ more nor you do, Cockie,” was the boy’s reply; “but it strikes dis chile dat dey have all taken leave of der senses, ebery moder’s son of dem. And de captain he have gone up into de crow’s-nest, which looks for all de world like a big barrel of treacle, Cockie, and he have shut hisself in der, and nuffin’ does he do but wave a long stick wid a black ball at de end of it. (The fan with which Greenland captains guide their men in the direction of the seals.) Dat is all de knows; but oh! Cockie, don’t you take such drefful big mouf-fuls o’ hemp. Supposin’ anyting happen to you, Cockie, den I hab nobody to talk to dat fully understand dis chile.”
The Canny Scotia was moored to the ice so close to the Arrandoon that the captains of the respective ships could maintain a conversation without stressing their lungs to any very great extent. Talking thus, each in his own crow’s-nest, they looked for all the world like a couple of chimney-sweeps conversing together from rival chimneys. The cooks were not idle in the galleys, they were busy boiling hams and huge joints of beef, and these, when cooked, were taken on deck; for sealing is hungry work, and every time a man brings a drag to the vessel’s side he helps himself to a lordly slice and a biscuit.