With the flags’ first flutter the air went round to the north, and now, instead of being heavy and depressing, there is a bracing feeling, and the eye can see far and wide amongst the lanes of sea-water and the floes of hummocky ice. Harp seals dash across the surface of the loch we are in, as if they too enjoyed the change from damp, heavy air to the keen, sharp, exhilarating air from the north. There is no use firing at these harp seals in the water, for they always sink on being shot. Besides, some of us think a shot might disturb the she-bear and family. She went off to a floe about the size of Perthshire, and we follow round northerly, and perhaps to-morrow morning we may sight her again.
One of the prettiest and rarest things in the world is to see a mother bear with her cubs, the little yellow fellows with their black eyes and noses jumping and rolling over their mother, pulling her ears, and the old bear showing every sign of love for her offspring. Then to see the old bear stalking a seal and the little ones sitting away behind, jogging each other, making notes about their mother’s cleverness. Their education takes two years. The smaller black bear of Newfoundland and America sends away its young after one year’s teaching; there means of subsistence are more simply obtained, there is so much wild fruit and so many roots and other things for them to eat. But to stalk a seal up here on these flat ice-floes, even with a rifle, takes very considerable skill. I speak with feeling. For the bear to get within clinching distance must require even greater experience. The polar bear has usually two and sometimes three of a family, not oftener than once in two years. The mother is frequently seen with only one cub and the father is then supposed to have eaten the other. The male bear is said to take little or no interest in the education of its young. Why the young, two or three year old bear we first caught showed such interest in the old bear, Hamilton’s first bear, I cannot quite understand, for though he kept half-a-mile to leeward he always seemed to have an eye lifting for the old bear’s movements. I wonder if he was waiting for the old fellow to kill something, then to drop in on a neighbourly call about meal-time.
Alas, this journal is all bear as yet, and no whale to speak of; I have never been in such lifeless water anywhere in regard to cetacean life. And yet we should see various whales, the Balæna Mysticetus, called the Right whale, bowhead or Greenland, the fat, slow, but valuable whale of the old-fashioned whaling....
In the evening a bear was spotted. Gisbert and Don José and three men set out after it. With the glasses we saw the bear disappear in the distance and then the little black spots of straggling figures also disappeared. They returned several hours later in the best of spirits, though they had never seen the beast. They had fallen in with a curious experience. On the floe they found a greeny blue grotto—I remember we saw them standing on a high ridge, it must have been under this—into which they went, and were amused at the ghastly silvery appearance of their hands and faces. It was about fifteen yards long, and they could walk in upright, with a blue shallow pool in the middle, and overhead part of the snow and ice was thawed to about a thickness of a few inches and the blue light shining through this with icicles hanging thick, gave an effect that can be imagined. I think I would rather have seen that than have killed the bear. There were no bears in the grotto; but I know of a man, Captain Yule by name, of Dundee, who killed—well, I hardly like to say how many bears, in such a cave. Take a blue cave, whity yellow bears with their dark eyes and the sombre figure of the man, and rifle smoke, flame and blood, and you have a picture fit for the cover of The Wide World Magazine.
They had walked about ten kilometres over snow, rough going, and came back about one A.M., wet, with ice on beards and moustaches, but glowing and happy with the exercise. They had a hot grog, got off long boots and were very comfortable, when another bear was spotted, and away they went over the bow by the rope-ladder to the ice, chawing biscuits and chocolate as they went. Don José being a little tired his cousin took his place, and Gisbert went off merrily. Spaniards are very sporting so far as I know them; they work up to their collars, always keep up a cheery appearance, and—can’t they sleep after exercise—it is now past midday and there is not a sign of any of them! There is a fresh breeze, but it is foggy, with sun overhead, so we cannot do much.
To put in time I took a boat after a hooded-seal, which I spotted through a lift in the sunny haze about a mile off on a small floe. We excuse ourselves killing seals by thinking of the benefit we confer on our fellow-men in the South by adding to the general store of material used in the manufacture of margarine and olive oil; but besides this base commercial consideration we have our captive bears to consider, they must exist, to afford amusement and instruction some day in our Zoological Park in Edinburgh, London, or Madrid. As I approached, the seal finally shovelled himself off the snow into the sea and disappeared. Trusting to its showing some curiosity, we waited, and it came up about a hundred yards off, and showed part of its head, which I managed to hit, but it disappeared. So we waited about the place, and by-and-by it came up only about twenty yards away, when a shot from the pistol finished its pain. In my experience it is a very rare thing for a seal to reappear after being wounded or killed. I must disagree with Sir Ernest Shackleton in this matter. He said in a lecture to our Royal Geographical Society apropos of Antarctic seals: “As fast as we killed them, up they came again.”
It is a strange life this up North, a little while ago mist and cold, and you longed to be home—wherever that might be—and now the sun is shining hot, and you might be in a yacht off Aberdeen in summer; it is the same crystalline atmosphere, with cold air, hot sun, but bracing—very nice indeed! But up here there is some risk!—only two hours ago we were in a tight place. No real old Arctic whaler would mention this; they all minimise dangers—for their own comfort; if they did not, they would end in staying on shore and going to the workhouse. But the writer, who is only an amateur whaler who “only plays hide-and-seek with the sea,” as a nephew of mine puts it, may be allowed to say that there was grave danger, and putting aside whale and bear dangers, there was in this one of our first really nice, sunny evenings, a very serious prospect of our spending the last few months of our lives on a floe with a failing commissariat. We ran ourselves on to a green ice tongue that we thought had enough water over it to float us, and got fast. I was below, and though accustomed to the ordinary shock of ramming ice, I knew at once, by the long rise of our bows and the roll to port and starboard that we were in a fix. Perhaps a small diagram may help to explain—so here you see two floes meeting, bright sunshine, blue sky overhead, and rippling blue water where there are open pools in the ice—a scene of perfect summer peace. The two floes, each weighing millions of tons, are very wide; they are slowly moving towards each other; they nearly meet; and we mistakenly try to get between them before they close, and run our stem and half our keel on to A, the submerged ice-foot of the floe B. The floe C is coming towards us in the direction of B—well, to cut it short, if the floes C and B meet, with the Fonix between them, our party, thirty all told, have our little house squeezed, and when the floe opens our home goes down and we get on to the floe till we are rescued by some relief expedition, or we flicker out. But for having lots to do I personally would have felt the necessity of a pipe or a dram—but as it was the writer and two men and a boat had their hands full, getting out an ice-anchor and wire-rope astern to D to kedge her off. The said hawser burst and the artist showed the seamen the bend for a wire-rope, in a hurry or at any time. Boy Scouts know it. Hamilton stood by at the wheel and Svendsen and men shifted the cargo aft to take the weight off the bow. An ice-tongue of floe C touched at D and gave us breathing-space and by-and-by we kedged her off astern, just in time to avoid a squeeze, and got through between the floes. One might write a chapter about our manœuvres, but now the guitar is going and the skipper has thanked the artist for handling that nasty rough, rusty wire hawser against time, and expressed somewhat flattering surprise at his knowing how to make a simple fisherman’s bend in a hurry; and again we are in open, quiet waters and open ice, with a hundred yards between each floe, and everyone frightfully cheerful. For some of us at least knew, though our Spanish friends apparently did not, the grim possibilities. Also we are all the better of the efforts in a small boat and the work of shifting cargo, barrels of salt, etc. I guess and bet Svendsen will not take any more unnecessary chances of dodging through too narrow lanes between this time and the next.
By late aften-mad we have quieted down, and have a beautiful display of the bull ring. Chee Chee, our young Gordon setter (or collie; it’s a little of both), does the bull, Don Luis Herrero de Velasquez does our espada, and other bull-ring functionaries all to perfection, with a foil for the espada and a sack for the Vueltu, this on our upper deck in the ten o’clock P.M. sun, everyone applauding and the steward’s guitar joining in below. His music is very cheap music, in such a contrast to Gisbert’s old airs, half Spanish, half African, that go away down to the depths.