I was never with such a musical party. The steward also plays the guitar, and, with a wire arrangement attached to its neck, holds a melodeon or mouth-organ to his mouth and makes a very clever but horrible orchestral effect.
To-day, the 7th of July, Monday, we are into calmer water, grey sky and cold—we passed a little ice at night and met our first ivory gull, it is the harbinger of the North Polar regions, as the white petrel down South tells of the ice edge. Last night we drew lots for watches, Hamilton and I take ours together—we take the second six hours watch—Don José and his brother Don Luis[13] take the first six hours, and their cousin, Don Luis[14] and De Gisbert take the third; this arrangement allows us a change of six hours each day. The idea is that the two on watch are to risk their lives against any whale, bear or ferocious animal that may turn up on their watch. To cheer us up on this somewhat quiet evening, Gisbert yarned to us about his previous trips to the Arctic; and told us about some of the ice-protected vessels that lay round us in Trömso. One of them, the smallest, a mere twenty-tonner, with a crow’s nest at its short foremast, he told us, came back from the ice single-handed a year ago! Another, a yacht-like auxiliary schooner, with fiddle bows, but heavily protected, a year or two ago was up at the west ice—that is, east of Greenland—with a party of Germans. They became overdue and a search party in another small vessel set out, which called at Jan Mayen Island on the way north, but found no signs of the lost party; so they pursued their way north into the floes—hunted about till they burst their ship up, and only one man returned. On comparing dates the first party was found to have actually called on their return journey at Jan Mayen and left only twelve hours before the relief party called. A letter left at the hut on the island to this effect would have saved fifteen lives of the rescue party.
As we are going to the “West Ice,” north-east of Greenland, such stories give a sense of anticipated troubles to our little trip—if, however, one only thought of the dangers of life, who would go motoring or eat a fish or go to bed?
De Gisbert has picked up several stranded sealers, on his previous expeditions north; a lot of these set out in poor vessels with no equipment; for fur-hunting, for blue fox, bear and seal skins; and they often came to grief. A party of four wintered in Spitzbergen, badly provisioned, and when he fell in with them, one lay dead, a second was in the last stage of scurvy, and the other two were barely able to come on board and tell their tale. De Gisbert took the sick man and isolated him—and a distinguished doctor on board said he had not a chance of life, half his face was gone. He asked for beer, and the doctor said: “Give him as much as he likes to drink. He is a dead man.” So he got that light Norwegian ol, more and more of it; he drank one hundred and fifty-six bottles in five days, and recovered!
Another troublesome sealer he took home had gone crazy on board a small boat on its outward voyage. De Gisbert hails all sealers and gives them tobacco and their longitude and latitude, and possibly a bottle of whisky, all of which things they are generally quite without—as often as not they carry neither sextant nor chronometer. He was asked to take this man who had gone crazy back to Norway, and as Gisbert was on his way south, to save them their season’s sealing, he humanely did so. The man partially recovered and was let loose, and messed forward, in the fo’c’sle. But suddenly one day, at meal-time, he went mad again and cleared everyone out of the fo’c’sle with a knife in his hand; and they had to lasso him through the fo’c’sle skylight! Naturally they put into the first Norwegian village they came to up north and asked the police to take over the lunatic; but the police besought Gisbert to take him on to Hammerfest and they would telegraph and have him met there. He did so, much to his own loss of time, and at Hammerfest one small boy came off in a boat to take, single-handed, the raving lunatic, who required two strong men and a strait jacket: he died two days after.
De Gisbert talks of his plans for this coming Spanish Polar expedition and finds the writer a sympathetic listener, for have we not worried ourselves over similar troubles, the raising capital and planning of an expedition to the Far South?
We sight ice in the afternoon, and grey and cold it is—alas, that the thrill of the first sight of ice should not repeat itself. My young friends do not seem to be greatly impressed, not so much so as we were years ago, when, after a three months’ voyage, the mist rose and we had our first vision of the marvellous architecture of Antarctic ice.
Here it is not so impressive as in the South, but beyond doubt it can show its teeth quite effectively. Curiously it is often the old, experienced deep-sea sailor who feels the greatest sensation on going into the ice for the first time. All his life he has religiously avoided knocking up against anything in the way of ice or rocks, so when he is called to go straight in amongst ice-blocks it affects him more than it would a landsman. I know of such a captain and his first experience up here. When he had brought his ship into the ice, the crashing and thumping got on his nerves so that he retreated to his cabin, and bolted himself in, and had to be fed through the skylight for three days. This is a true bill.