Small floes are now on all sides, and mist. We run through one small stream of ice, shoving the pieces aside, leaving our green paint behind and some splinters on the jagged ice feet, and it is rather a sensation for my friends, their first experience of ice—then we heave to and drift. By-and-by we spot a hooded-seal and our first watch goes to the bows in the faint hope of getting a shot from board-ship, as we think the movement in the small boat would spoil their aim, and the seal understands and pops off the ice when we are eight hundred yards off; so we retire to the cabin and the stove; for it is beastly cold and damp, and write up journals and almost wonder if we are not rather fools to come so far for such disagreeable circumstances. Still in the back of our minds we remember what a difference a little sunlight makes in a polar scene.
CHAPTER XXIV
My first impressions of the Arctic ice compared to Antarctic ice are distinctly disappointing, which reminds me of my friend Dr Bruce’s first impressions of the same. He had been in the Antarctic, then came up here to join the Jackson Harmsworth expedition. For several days they had been going through ice when he remarked: “I would rather like to see one of your polar icebergs.” “What!” they said, “you have passed a dozen of them in the last two days. Why, there is one now,” and they pointed to a piece of ice about seventy feet high, and about two hundred feet in length. Bruce was silent. I remember one of the first considerable bergs we saw in the South was over two hundred feet in height and more than nine miles long—we only saw one end of it! He had not quite realised that an Arctic berg was so small a thing compared to the majestic Antarctic bergs he had been familiar with off Graham’s Land, and in the Weddell Sea. When grounded and shoved up, the Antarctic bergs are sometimes several hundred feet in height, and have, we know from soundings, a total thickness of about one thousand feet.
As we sat looking at the rather gloomy view—grey sea and bits of bluish ice—one of us spotted a black speck away down to leeward and the first watch bolted for their rifles and we steamed down. Pop—pop—went the rifles, the mausers at about fifty yards. A lucky shot drew “first blood”—a small one-year-old hooded-seal. Great was the rejoicing in our little community, and we forgot the cold and dreary aspect, and dropped a boat and the seal was aboard and flinched in no time.
Then the writer turned in for one, also Archie, and the señors made merry with a tiny drop of whisky and soda, and were very well pleased. In my dreams I heard another shot and the engine stopped, and we crunched up against ice, so I knew another seal had gone to the happy hunting grounds; I showed a leg for half-a-minute, not more, it was shivering cold on deck.
Young Don Luis Velasquez had got the seal through the head, first blood for his split new rifle, telescope sight, etc.
On this almost mild morning of pigeon-grey sky, light and fine rain (8th July), we are passing through a wilderness of ice pans and small floes and the soft grey sky is reflected on the rippling lavender-coloured sea. The ice pans are mostly blue and white, like blue muslin overlaid with white, which shows almost emerald-green under the water. On the pans are fresh-water pools reflecting soft grey of sky, each pool surrounded by a rim of pale cobalt. So I wonder if there is any blue paper on board to paint on, with white body colour; that might secure the effect most rapidly. And on some of the floes are seals lying at rest, whilst others disport themselves as dolphins do in the sea, but we stop not for these, for the lavender sky is deep in colour away ahead, so we know there is more or less open water free of ice, possibly leaving a road for us to Greenland’s ice-bound strand. That is our object, slightly uncertain of attainment, as it depends on the drift of the polar ice from the North. In some years you can make the land easily—other years it is unattainable.
We keep a sharp look-out from the crow’s nest and bridge and deck for the blow of a whale; possibly we may spot a Nord Capper, or even the scarce Greenland Right Whale Balæna Mysticetus, and lift £1000 or so. We have tackle for them, but the finner whale on this trip we must leave alone, he is too monstrous strong. I have written about their capture in the first part of this book.
Here we may meet a large male polar bear, for they venture far afield. Nearer land we are likely to fall in with family parties, females and cubs. Where the seals are, there are the bears. It is a very curious thing about seals of the Antarctic sea as compared with these Arctic seals, that you very seldom see them in the South showing their heads above water; either they are under water or entirely out and up on the ice. I have seen many thousands there, and only remember seeing about a dozen heads above water in several months. And here again, or round our coasts, seals constantly show their heads above water. Another odd difference is that in the Southern Polar ice-seals make for the middle of the ice-sheet if they feel any alarm. They expect no harm to come to them on the ice. In fact, you can go up to them and touch them. Here they waddle off as fast as their flippers and caterpillar-like movements will take them, and get into the water for security, the reason being, that in the North they have bears and men and land animals to contend with, and neither man, bear, nor any other land animal exists down South. There the enemy is in the sea, the orca gladiator, the grampus killer, which has most awful jaws and teeth, to judge by the huge wounds one finds on the bodies of these very great seals.