Later, a great narwhal raised his back and tail right astern, groaned and went under with hardly a ripple, and we saw his white length come towards us under the glassy surface and disappear under the ship. So the whale-boat was lowered and a crew went out and lay a hundred yards off. My fishing instinct told he was the only one about, so I stayed on board and painted an ice effect. The whale-boat and men lay perfectly reflected, and looked almost too still and colourless through the thin mist to be real, looking more like a faded print of people waiting for perch than whalers waiting with stern intent to do or die. Bow lay on his back smoking, the smoke rising straight up, the others chatted in subdued voices.
On board, Pedersen the steward started his guitar and mouth-organ, and altogether, with the tum-tum, common waltz music, and the outer stillness it did not feel a bit as it ought to do in the Arctic regions,
“Where there’s frost and there’s snow
And the stormy winds do blow,
And the daylight’s never done,
Brave Boys,”
as the old song goes.
I have mentioned our many-sided steward. Photography seems to be another of his accomplishments—hobbies, I should say. Light or no light, he fires his camera. We could not help smiling the other day when he went for the first time on to the floe with a party to photograph a bear-hunt. Hardly had he gone five yards when one leg went deep into a hole in the floe and his shoe came off. He emptied the water, and then the other came off, so he hastily fixed his tripod, fired a shot at the ship and came on board again, and took to the guitar and his proper offices. To-night a sudden idea seized him and he left his cosy corner by our galley fire and Johanna, our “she-cook,” and came with guitar and that instrument called the mouth-organ, and arranged our bears’ heads and skins on the main-hatch, and sat himself down on a block of wood between them and got one of the men to fire his camera at him. But first he produced a pocket-mirror, when I called his attention to a hair being astray, and having arranged that, he pulled his white jacket into position, fixed up the guitar and mouth-organ and struck a fine pose. I might have fired a plate at him, but there was not nearly enough light. The head of Hamilton’s enormous bear, as if resentful of this last indignity of having to pose in such a picture, broke the barrel it rested on as if in protest—even the head and neck is a big lift for one man.
Another picture composed itself a little later. We watered ship from one of these shallow blue pools on the floe, two men at the pool filling tin pails with a large tin bailer. To encourage them our jolly, burly vivandière went out to them with her cheery laugh, carrying a glass and bottle of aqua vite. There was colour! and if not elegance, a beauty of fitness, which is saying a good deal for the lady; the ample, strong form, in pale blue and white pinafore kind of dress, tripped over the floe, and the deep blue of the sailors’ clothes and her red cheeks, and the golden yellow of the aquavit, the grey of the zinc pails, and the blue and white of the snow, suddenly struck one as the first decided effect of strong colour contrast which we have seen for days.
Nothing very exciting to-day, mist and snow on deck till evening, when it cleared, and became very calm. We were all at aften-mad when word came a bear was sighted, so our Spanish friends armed themselves and went forward to the bows, and the vessel slowly approached the floe on which the bear had been seen, and to our astonishment the bear approached the ship steadily, and lightly climbed a round snow-block and steadily gazed at us, a pale primrose patch in a great whiteness, with interesting dark eyes and muzzle. I have tried to recall the effect, but the highness of the scheme of colour makes it difficult to paint, and probably impossible to reproduce by any process of colour-printing.