The whole aspect of the place was forbidding in the extreme—too bleak and desolate to make one think of looking there for game did he not know better beforehand. But there were, towards the centre of the island, some small pools or lakes of snow-water, which furnished moisture for the growth of great quantities of moss; and in this moss, after the waters had subsided and left it dry, the birds had built their nests, lining them with the delicate down which grows upon the breast. This the bird plucks off with her bill to the extent of a good handful, leaving the feathers intact; and when she quits her nest to feed, she covers her eggs with this warm material to keep them warm. In regions farther south the Greenlanders make descents upon the islands, and carry off this fine lining of the nests, which, when cleaned, becomes the well-known and very valuable “eider-down” of commerce. “Live down” is the commercial name for it; and it is a singular fact that the same material plucked from the bird even an instant after death is worthless. The wonderful elasticity which gives such great value to the “live down” is wholly wanting in the dead.
During the early part of the season the ducks go in pairs, and the contrast between the two is very great—the female bird being brown and homely, while the male is black, with cream-colored breast and neck, and has the most beautiful tints of green upon his head. If the nest is robbed of down, and the female’s own supply is exhausted, the male will sometimes obligingly pluck himself to accommodate her; but after she begins to “sit” he is seldom seen about her nest or in her company, and, indeed, is not allowed there except when she has been robbed, and wants his help to refresh the family nest. The males then flock together—like hen-pecked husbands at the clubs—and are very wild. To get within range of them at all one must lie low behind the rocks, and wait for them to fly overhead. In this manner we shot quite a number, and found their flesh a little fishy, but very fair. We enjoyed the afternoon’s sport immensely, and perhaps not the less that the captain had come ashore very soon after we landed to convey the pleasing intelligence that, the tide having risen, the Panther was afloat and all right. And apart from this, we liked to have the captain on all hunting expeditions. He was generally the best shot, which detracted something, of course, since he was pretty sure to be the winner. But then he was always gay and lively; and he carried a gun which nobody but a tall, powerful man like himself could possibly have used—one of those Newfoundland sealing-guns—long enough, ordinarily, to knock a bird over without firing. But the captain was too fond of sport for work of that sort, and he invariably allowed the bird to get beyond the muzzle before he pulled trigger. Fifteen dozen birds rewarded us well for some fatigue, undergone in a temperature warm enough to enable us to dispense with coats, even although we were in latitude 74°, and surrounded on every side by ice.
The islands were so full of interest, and possessed so many romantic associations, that I wandered about them, from one to the other, rather in pursuit of my own fancy than of game. Everywhere that I went there appeared traces of the whalemen—at one place a flag-staff, at another place the fragment of a wreck; here they had built a fire, and there they had made a camp; and upon the very summit of the outer island, five hundred feet above the sea, we discovered the walls of an old look-out station, behind which many a hardy mariner whose ship was “beset” among the ice had come and watched, perhaps for days, waiting and hoping for some favorable change of wind and weather to bring a change of ice and change of fortune.
On another part of this same island we came upon seven graves. They were about fifty yards from the beach, on a rapidly sloping hill-side facing the west, beneath a great tall cliff, which forms a conspicuous landmark for vessels approaching from that direction.
Never was place of human sepulture more desolate. Here there were no birds; there was not even a blade of grass, nor a bit of moss—not a living thing—nothing but a waste of naked rocks and loose stones, that had been tumbled by the frosts of winter from the cliffs above. The dead had been laid in some convenient place among the rocks, and the stones had been heaped upon the coffins; and at the head of each rude sepulchre there had been placed a board on which the shipmates of the dead sailor had carved his name and age, and the place of his nativity, his ship, and rank, and day of death.
There was something very touching in the evident care with which the last sad offices of the living to the dead had been performed. But even there, in the drear solitude, other men had followed after the mourners, and graves which the wild beasts had respected, and which showed such signs of tender solicitude, had been most barbarously desecrated. The graves themselves remained as they had been originally prepared, but the head-boards, on which careful hands had carved the brief record of a career that the grave closed over, were broken into splinters, and strewn upon the rocks around. A party from some whale-ship (it could be no other) had landed there, and, using the head-boards of the graves for targets, had blown them all to pieces with ball and shot. Not a single one remained intact, and the resting-place which each was meant to tell of could not possibly be identified. Nor could much be made of the splinters that I found. The records on two of these ran thus:
“Of the ship Jane, of Hull, died April 28, 1832:”
“Who died on board of the ship Alexander, of Dundee, June 21, 1842, aged 42 years.”
But to neither of these was any name attached; and even this much was deciphered with difficulty, so effectual had been the aim of the vandals. Another splinter told that
“Wm. Hardy, aged 59,”
had died, but I could not make out the name of his ship or the date of his death. Even about the “Wm.” there was uncertainty. The only perfect one ran thus: