Even our home, lately so sedate and dignified and restrained in its movements in amongst the ice, has taken a jolly seaman-like lurch and roll. The crow’s nest and mast, shining in the sun, go swinging to and fro across the sky—now she puts her nose down into the blue, pleasantly, and rises and our old level horizon of the ice days is away below us as our bows point to the skies—right and left we roll and we swing her south-east, for habitable land, for Trömso and Trondhjem and green trees growing and new fresh food; for even a few months in the ice with food getting rather stale makes us hanker a little after a new kitchen. We are tired of eating bear and of looking at their legs, which adorn our shrouds, great red-black limbs that we see all day swinging against the sky and eat slices of at every meal. Eating and seeing dead bear and hearing and smelling the living captives twenty-four hours of the day is too much of a good thing, so this is why we hanker after a new kitchen.
I dislike a storm at sea, but I do confess I love the sea when it is smooth and blue, and it soothes you with a long gentle roll such as we have to-day.
Our Last Glimpse of the Ice
It looks as if we were to have a smooth crossing to Norway, still the fiddles must come down from our cabin walls and again grace our little table. For in a small boat such as ours every yachtsman knows that they are inevitable whilst deep-sea sailing. Gisbert cleans his rifle and the fiddles are on the table! so we are really done with the Arctic in the meantime. He and I each used our rifles an hour or two ago in the ice. No one knew who was to shoot at a seal on a floe that possessed a coat we all envied; we were rapidly passing, so someone had to shoot and that quickly, so Gisbert and I dived for our respective rifles, and each loaded at the same instant and each fired as we swung past at eighty yards, and each within the hundredth part of a second, and each hit the seal in the middle. Neither of us knows which was the vital shot. We shoved the ship’s head against the floe and a man clambered over the bow and made a lasso fast to the seal. It seems a small matter to pot a seal on an ice-floe, but I would give many pounds, shillings and pence to be able to pass on the beauty of the colouring of that chunk of ice and green and lilac reflections in the purple sea, the silvery grey of the seal sparkling in the sunlight on the snow, and the reflected white light on the pink face of the man who jumped on to the ice to bring it aboard. The Prophet, we call him, a typical Norseman, with blue eyes, bushy yellow eyebrows, yellow hair and a kindly expression—he may be thirty years old, he might be a thousand—he is a type. His prophecies almost always come true. “It will be better before it is worse.” “We will get another bear before Gisbert cleans his rifle,” and so on. Remarks such as above are more interesting in his broken English—our steward’s broken English this morning almost rose to the level of punning. Archie Hamilton asked him sympathetically how he had slept—Archie, Gisbert and the steward all sleep in the fore part of the deck-house, and the bears are just outside. Gisbert snores, and the steward coughs alarmingly, and the bear shouts, so Archie says he has not slept a wink for nights. “Nay, nay,” said Pedersen, “no mans can sleep, der is Gisbare, he go snore, snore, und dem fordumna ice-bears dey go roar, roar, all de nights—no man can sleep noddings!”
At night we are in the open sea, rolling south-east, and try to hit off the north of Norway somewhere. The sun almost sets now, there is at any rate the warm glow of sunset, it pours into our two cabin ports from the north, making two golden discs wave up and down on the white walls that look quite green in contrast.
The guitar is mended, the glue gave way with the fog in the ice and the heat of the stove combined. So again we have music, Gisbert the principal performer, the writer causing some surprise at his remembering part of a Spanish love song picked up in Southern Spain. Gisbert sings a number of these queer folk-songs, with their strange airs and unexpected intervals and the beat of Africa in the heart of them.
I insert the scrap referred to above. It is not everyone who cares for this minor music, but it draws tears to a Spaniard’s eyes; and it appeals to the writer, inexplicably, for we have no music like it in our country.