You may not think it, but such a small attempt at an amusing drawing caused laughter on board. You see a little joke goes a long way in the ice-pack, as for instance the drawing below.
The only mild excitement to-day, 2nd August, was a boat expedition, with los señores, two rifles in the bow, and two pairs of oars, against a large harp-seal, with a splendid white skin and large black spots, suggestive of an A1 carriage-rug. Fire opened at a hundred yards (the first shot was accidental), but several struck the water quite close and in front of the seal, which made it take up a very indignant attitude, and for an instant it seemed to hesitate as if it thought a retreat on to the floe would be its safest course. But a bullet finally hit it in the back and it acted on its first intention and dived off the floe. The two Don Josés were rather disconsolate, for certainly it had a very beautiful skin. We hoped to get quite a lot of these large harp-seal skins and their blubber to fill our casks.
The harp blows his nose up in a remarkable way, so hard that it inflates the fore part of its head. Naturalists assure us that, like the shark’s fin, this has an awe-inspiring effect on their opponents. We accept this cum grano salis. This is what I remember of the harp’s attitude and expression (1) before he was actually fired at, (2) its attitude of astonishment, and we may call the next his adieu. These designs are executed, you observe, with a certain chaste economy of lines. ([See p. 274.])
An Incident from “Bearing Straights.”
CHAPTER XXXIII
Finding no whales and being unable to get on to Greenland, for some twenty miles of ice now separate us from its shore, we decide to turn back.
Right about wheel then, for we are sick of eternal flat ice-floes. If we had a new boiler, new coal supply, new food supply and unlimited time, we would hang on. The ice may open in ten or twelve days, but we arranged to finish our hunting, if possible, at Trömso, Norway, about the middle of August. So we have just time and no more to get there by that time, granted there is fine weather and little fog.
But as I write, seven P.M., we are again into a fog bank and have to tie up to a floe. It is thin fog, and sun shines through it and we hope it will lift. So it is good-bye to our chances of whales, musk oxen, or walrus, for walrus we can only get along the coast in shallow soundings. One whale, and that only a narwhal, is our poor basket. We must console ourselves with having got a fair number of bears in the time—seventeen in the month, one narwhal and a lot of seals. It will not pay, but we may yet get bottle-nose down about Jan Mayen Island, if the drift takes us southerly in that direction before we get out of the ice easterly.