I have made a picture of a pack of rather small killers attacking a finner whale, an incident I observed in the southern ice from the distance of two or three yards. They pursued the large whale like a pack of black and white hounds, but neither whale nor hounds made a sound that I could hear.
Dr Frangius, however, in his “Treatise of Animals,” says that when an orca pursues “a whale” the latter makes a terrible bellowing, like a bull when bitten by a dog. I wonder what kind of whale he refers to, for I have seen a number of finner whales being attacked by orcas and have not heard any bellowing, except the narwhal, whose groan is certainly like a subdued bellow of a cow.
Yesterday we had wind, and the sky that portended wind if any sky does. When you have this sky it is almost safe to prophesy wind—say three days of it—this is our second day.
We make one mile an hour forward. We are a hundred miles off Norway and hoped to be in soundings fishing cod at two A.M. to-morrow on the coast. But here we are plugging almost at the same hole, our poor wee ship throbbing with the strain. We carried away our mainsail yesterday—a thing to make a yachtsman weep; still, after all, it was a sail, and even one sail on a steamer gives dignity. Don Luis Herrero in the lee alley-way just cleared the halyard block. Had he not been very quick in his movements, as many Spaniards are, he would have been a dead man. Starboard bear broke half out; that is nothing new. William has learned the mandolin, he has a piece of wood in his cage, one side of which is crossed horizontally with stout wire, and with the wood, holding it in his teeth, he scrapes the wires up and down and plays three notes for ever and for ever. I do hope that, in whatever zoo he may become a resident, he may be provided with a similar instrument with which to fill his life. He, as far as I can see, now makes no effort to escape like his big relative the Starboard bear, who is more of a mechanical genius than an artist. William’s sister Christabel behaves well on the whole, takes lots of tinned milk and water. Poor old Starboard, he really looked pathetic after his big effort this morning; he is black, or brown-black now, as I have already mentioned, and his black eyes, by contrast, look light brown, so does his nose. No one would take him for an ice-bear. His voice changed after the effort, and he made a sort of piteous sound instead of challenging and held his mouth open, and I suggested water, and Archie poured a pail of fresh water into his feeding drawer from a chink in the roof of the cage, and he eagerly lapped it up and went off to sleep. They have plenty of salt water—a small sea came over the bows a little while ago, and swept away every chip they had torn; incidentally it swept into an open bunker and nearly drowned the Prophet, who was acting as stoker in the engine-room. He came on deck looking rather wet and depressed and fossicked round and got the cover of the stokehold closed; it was under a bear’s cage, so it was not so easy. In the ice the Prophet was a jolly bear-hunter, with lasso round his shoulder (which he could not throw), also he was clean and “the Prophet.” With such yellow curly hair and eyebrows and blue eyes and pink, clean face he seemed essentially an ice-man; it is rather a come-down to be merely a black stoker homeward bound at the end of a cruise, and with nothing to prophesy.
My word, it is time to shut my cabin door on this early morning. Starboard bear and a starboard cabin! and the bear awake and growling hell and thunder, and a big sea running too. Blow his money value we say!
Everyone is rather tired of the violent ceaseless movement and the drenching of spray, but our two youngest Spaniards, in heavy coats, make merry over it, sitting up on the bridge and chatting and singing continuously, pluckily keeping their spirits up. I think they would do the same even if we had a full-fledged gale.
Our musical steward, sad to say, has felt the roughness of the trip, fog and wind combined, and this afternoon we were anxious about him, rolled him up very tight in blankets and put a hot bottle at his feet, for he was throwing up blood and seemed about to die; in fact, he looks a dead man now. Hamilton too is feeling tired and lies down. Altogether we would be glad to be up some fiord fishing cod for the sake of the rest and fresh food.
We had a gleam of sun from the north to-night, golden precious sunlight; it touched waves far away in front of us till they were yellow as golden guineas, while the crests near us were colder, more sickly white than silver or thawing snow.
Every cloud has its silver lining, but give me the touch of gold on the crests of long waves at the end of a gale, half the crest radiant, and the side in shadow cold, bluish white.
But our short-lived sun-gleam fades and we are all in grey—the timbers creak, creaking anxiously, sorely, and we plod along, two miles to the hour at the best, our disreputable sail set again,—a subdued crew longing for land.