To-day, 31st of July, in the early morning, we got to within a few miles of Shannon Island, North-East Greenland, and could see the snowy lomonds behind it. Though the land is almost entirely snow-clad, it looks comforting after a month at sea. But the pack ice is too jammed to the west to allow us to land, so we steer slowly south, winding in and out amongst the ice-islands, sometimes shoving a small one aside. We picked up a big seal this morning, a bearded seal, P. Barbata; it is the biggest seal of the Arctic. Still steering southerly, Greenland faint to the westward, with glasses we see fiords and glaciers. Sky and sea silky and still, the only sound the faint pulsation of our little engine. It is hot in the sun! I can hardly believe it, and yet huge icicles are forming round the edges of the ice-tables. The endless floes grow wearisome. There is too little life. There are only a few seals, only a few sea-birds and not a sign of a whale. The pensive sunlit stillness of the day and the mirror-like surface of the ocean were scarcely disturbed this afternoon by the slaughter of two great blue seals. The largest showed that a bear had lately paid it attention, by the cuts on its enormous body. It weighed on the steelyard three hundred kilos, equal to six hundred and sixty-seven pounds; about the weight of four policemen. A big bear with one paw can lift such a seal out of the water and throw it several yards on to the floe. The blue seal is rather like the Barbata or bearded seal, excepting the colour of its coat, which is more brown than the blue seal’s. Each has a very small head in proportion to the bulk of the body, both have only rudimentary teeth, they eat crabs and seaweed. Whether the teeth are provided for the purpose or whether the seal is restricted to such small fry because it has such poor teeth, is perhaps a matter which would be best discussed at the Royal Physical Society in Edinburgh or London after lunch.
Phoca Barbata
It may seem discontented, but I must confess this prolonged fine weather (we have had seventy-two hours of the same white sunlight) begins to get a little on our nerves. Nature here is so extremely mathematically laid out. The sea is polished to a high point, all the little cloudlets are arranged in such order that ribbed sea-sand would be quite irregular in comparison. So of course you have these cloudlets, level bands of pale blue and some faint yellows, all repeated in the mirror. Very high-toned delicate colour, but, if I may criticise, just a little sickly. I think with the advance of years one does not find these extremely delicate harmonies quite satisfying, one rather longs for ruddy, tawny colours and tropic blues in their deepest notes.
It is so calm, so stagnant, if I may say so, that our thin brown smoke hangs in wisps where we left it many hours ago. And yet for all the smoothness and polish there is an untidy aspect, for there are little and great bits of ice floating all over the place. There being no wind, little scraps of ice and big bits get all separated, and each takes up a bit of sea to itself. When there is any wind these pieces herd or pack together. We trust that the ice along the shore may soon follow this example, for it is only pack ice, not the fixed shore ice of winter. We hope it will disperse in a day or two and let us inshore to see “the saxifrage and poppies.”
With the glass we frequently look at the faint far-away mountains and glaciers. A little while ago I thought in the silence I heard a shot from away over there, thirty or twenty-five miles off—no, it must have been a glacier cracking, a berg calving, perhaps. That sound carries in such weather a tremendous distance, and so too does the wave made in the sea by the ice-cliffs falling.
Vessels lying in calm several miles away from such glaciers have been nearly swamped with the wave raised by a calving berg.
The evenings are now, on the 1st of August, just distinguishable from the day by a little increase of yellow in the sky and pink on the snow. To-night the sea froze over with a thin coat of ice and we go rustling through it.
Later, about twelve o’clock, we were in an open lane, between floes and no thin ice, where a family of narwhals seemed to be working for their living. So we lowered a whale-boat as quietly as possible and rowed gently after them, and as usual, just as we got, say, to within forty yards, and held the harpoon aimed ready to drive it into the biggest bull, say at twenty yards, for they show very little above water, they quietly slipped under for other ten or twenty minutes, and then appeared several hundred yards away. With modern big harpoon-gun from the bow of the small whaling steamer, we can harpoon from thirty to forty yards, but in shooting from the bow of small boat close to water’s level the range is more limited. We tried waiting, following, and circumvention, and when we tried to cut across their course, one of them broke water actually between the oar blades and the boat and made a great swirl; and evidently this too close contact scared the family party, and they all disappeared, and we went on board, still hopeful, however, for three times at least we had been within a second, or say two yards, of our chance of securing a great white ivory horn.
... Our patience was tried again and the writer’s was found wanting. I had turned in and heard the boat being lowered away, and let a crew go without me, and never heard them come back, though there must have been thunderous treading of sea-boots on deck a foot above my head, ropes falling and blocks rattling—you can sleep soundly here when you get the chance.