Now I have come to a point in this relation of the history of the St Ebba when I find myself in the position of a historical painter who was decorating a building in New York with a historical frieze of American history, and he stopped. “Why,” said his patrons, “do you stop?” “Why,” he replied, “because—you haven’t got any more history!” So our St Ebba’s history must also stop in the meantime. Possibly we may join her again and go on with our narration, and paint blue seas and coral strands fringed with waving palms, and hunt whales where there are never gales, and turn turtle and catch bonita and tunny and so on. Meantime we leave her at anchor in the Seychelles in charge of the mate, engineers and two men. The mate writes that his crew strike at turtle soup more than three times a week, and Henriksen has gone to Norway about the outfit for the new station and steamers for our developed Company.
Here it was the writer’s intention to bring in some notes about whaling in the Antarctic regions, 1892-1893, partly because they might contrast interestingly with the following recent notes on the Arctic seas, but this promised to make too large a volume, so we miss the Antarctic and go direct to notes about hunting and drawing in the Arctic.
CHAPTER XXIII
Now we come to notes about the Arctic regions, whales and bears, promised in the preface to this collection of spun yarn, as a sailor-man might call it. Long ago the writer, as a very small boy, vowed to go North and bring back bearskins. His instructress failed to excite his interest in short sentences, such as “The Cat ate the Rat,” so she gave him a little square green book by Ballantyne, called “Fast in the Ice,” and he at once made rapid progress, and he promised his instructress that he would go to Greenland some day and bring her white bearskins—now he has got them; but it is too late!
With this brief introduction we come to the subject of a little North Polar expedition we arranged this year (1913), six of us, to hunt for whales, musk oxen, walrus, seals and bears, or anything else of value in the way of heads or furs, which we could find.
I need not go into the financial aspect of the concern, but I may say my principal object was to study the Arctic regions as compared with the Antarctic and to make pictures of the northern ice, and animal life.
Dr W. S. Bruce, my companion of long ago in the Antarctic, came to see us off at the Waverley Station, and gave me a volume by that very remarkable Englishman, the whaler Scoresby, a scientist and whaler of the Arctic. That and Dr Bruce’s own splendid book of reference on the Antarctic and Arctic (“Polar Research”), and my friend Captain Trolle’s work on the Danish expedition to East Greenland, formed our Arctic library. Trolle’s description of the Danish expedition came in particularly well, as our intention was to visit the part of North-East Greenland, north and east of Shannon Island, which they charted in 1906-1908, and where, alas! they left their first leader, Captain Mylius Erichsen.