“To the memory of Thos. Roberts, seaman, Leith, who died on board the Alphen, of Peterhead, July 6th, 1825, aged 37 years.”
It was late in the afternoon when we brought up at the summit of the island in the whalers’ old look-out station, where we commanded a superb view of the surrounding region. How grandly the mountains and glaciers of Greenland loomed up on our right! How splendid was the sea around, speckled with ice, while here and there appeared a dark rocky island among the general whiteness. How tempting Melville Bay ahead, with its interminable “pack.”
CHAPTER III.
ICE-NAVIGATION.
While the chain is clicking in the hawse-hole, let us take a quiet view of the situation. There is no need, however, to describe with much minuteness the “Melville Bay pack” which lay before us. The ice freshly broken up in any large river is a sufficient illustration, provided the imagination will stretch the river to three hundred miles in width, and magnify the drifting fields of ice in proportion. In the early part of the season this ice is very hard, and many feet in thickness; but by August (which was the time of our being there) it has become porous, its thickness has been greatly reduced, much of it is on the eve of disappearing altogether, and still more of it has quite melted away. Almost all the fields, or the “floes,” as they are called by the whalers, have been eaten through in places; and over all there are pools of water formed of melted snow, which give them a mottled appearance.
In the month of August this “pack” is mostly confined to the Melville Bay region; hence the name of “Melville Bay pack,” which I have used before. At that season the navigation is not particularly difficult or dangerous. By keeping well away from the land the passage can then always be made with safety. It was by following the opposite course that Captain Sir Francis M’Clintock found himself delayed in 1857, with his ship firmly frozen fast, and with no alternative but to pass the winter drifting with the “pack” in a most uncomfortable and hazardous situation. Had he followed the example and advice of Dr. Kane, he might have won his knightly spurs a year sooner, and with less discomfort.
Earlier in the summer the pack extends far down Baffin’s Bay; and south of the Arctic Circle it stretches away to the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. And it is here that commerce profits by it, for the seals flock to it the moment it has ceased to be the solid ice of the winter, and become the “pack” ice of the spring. Of these seals there are many varieties. Some are permanent denizens of the North; others are migratory. These last only are found so low as Newfoundland and Labrador. Seeking the ice in the month of March, they crawl upon it, and there bring forth their young. These seals come up from the South—from the St. Lawrence region and along the shores of New Brunswick and Maine, where they have wintered—and with the ice they drift back south again until it melts away. Other varieties (the true Arctic seals) adhere to the solid ice, as far as possible, and, if drifted off southward with the pack, return north again to winter, and then, in order to breathe (for the seals are not fish, and can not breathe under water), they are compelled to keep holes open in the ice with their sharp claws. These true Arctic seals are not so numerous as the southern varieties, of which latter millions may sometimes be seen at one time upon the drifting ice. It is the young of these (when from two to three weeks old) that are slaughtered in such great numbers by the seal-fishers. The vessels, usually small schooners, but sometimes steamers like our Panther (which was built for that service), enter the pack, and the crew, scattering to right and left over the ice, gather up the seals as they go along, the vessel merely keeping pace with them. Upon the first attack the old ones abandon their young to their fate, and the innocent, whining “baby seals,” too young to appreciate danger, are captured without difficulty—a tap on the nose with the toe of a boot or with a boat’s “gaff” robbing them quickly of what little life they have.
THE POLAR BEAR.
From the seals let us pass to their enemies, the bears—I mean, of course, the true Arctic bears, known in different localities by different names—“ice-bears” they are usually called in the far north, because they are not found elsewhere than on the ice. But farther south this is not always true of them, since both from choice and necessity they often take the water, and are generally known on “the Labrador” as “water-bears.” They are often carried off from the pack upon a single ice-field, which, going to pieces under them, forces them to swim, perhaps, many miles before reaching another. I have seen one swimming in a heavy sea, where there was not a piece of ice in sight. They seldom take to the land, and never voluntarily. Their food has either failed them on the ice, or they are pursued by enemies, or the ice has all melted away and left them no alternative. The naturalist’s name, Ursus maritimus—“the bear of the sea”—expresses their character perfectly. In color they are yellowish-white—quite dark, indeed, when contrasted with the snow. “White bear” is therefore a misnomer, as is also “Polar bear;” but this latter is the name most commonly in use, and is the one, therefore, which I shall employ whenever referring to them.