From a Painting by the Author
I think this recapitulates our bearing for twenty-four hours rather concisely. It does not quite convey the slight chill you feel at setting out, on however beautiful and silvery a morning, at, say, five o’clock, after being up all night, to wade across ice and snow to face the horrible and dangerous Ursus Maritimus, or white monarch of the pole, and it does not give the calm sense of conceit that you feel when you have succeeded in slaughtering the same, and preserving your skin; it would be bad form to express such sentiments loud out. The only sign our Spanish friends showed was that they were a little sallow when they set out, and a little warmer in colour on their return. A. C. H. quotes Neil Munro to express his feeling. “Man,” he says, “am feeling shust sublime—could poo the mast oot o’ the ship an’ peat a Brussels carpet.” No wonder, lucky fellow, a one-thousand-and-twenty-pounder for his first polar bear. His first black bear we thought mighty big a year or two ago, away back in the barrens of Newfoundland; it weighed three hundred and eighty pounds. Which is best to eat, polar or black bear, it is hard to say. I vote for black bear pre salé and fed in the blueberry season. Still, the meat of the polar bears here is extremely good and feels strengthening. One needs strengthening. Yesterday was high summer, just touching freezing, but still and a little sunny; to-night a gale from north-east and cold, and ice driving gently round us.
But I am not complaining! No—I’ve been a summer and autumn in Antarctic ice. After the bad days and black nights there in January and February, nothing north of the Line need be considered as intolerable.
One note before winding up this day’s reckoning. If you wish to think of the Arctic or Antarctic, you must think in colour somehow or other. If you think in black and white you miss the idea, and form a wrong impression all in black and white, just as I used to have from engravings, and which it is very difficult to put aside. North Polar and South Polar regions are essentially places of very high-toned delicate colour, almost the only black is what you bring with you; mother-of-pearl and birch-bark tints you have, and grimness there is in dead earnest, dangers and minor discomforts, but it’s all in lovely colour in high note.
It is my watch and Gisbert’s to-night, but I am going to turn in after writing this; two nights without sleep make one feel inclined to ride out this gale behind a floe in one’s bunk—pipe, matches and book, and practice chanter, all within arm’s-length, and jolly comfortable it is; for, as Marcus Aurelius puts it: “If a man can live in a palace, he can live there well.”
I forgot to say we got our Bruin on board, after a terrible fight and some blood lost, human and bear’s. We got a strop round his waist when we had pulled him alongside with the lasso, and hauled him up in the air by the steam-winch, the chain and hook fast in the strop. I think this little drawing explains the method; it’s a most kindly and considerate treatment. I mention this to ease the mind of some people who concluded that a picture in this book of a bear hung by the head was a live bear being lifted on board instead of being a bear that had been shot for an attempt on our lives on the ice. Whalers and sealers and bear-hunters I have found just as humane and gentle a people as those who stay at home and often criticise them unkindly. We led the lasso under the floor bars of a big wooden cage which we made to-day; three men hauled his head down. Then we lowered him into the cage, and whilst he tried to free his head, battens were rapidly nailed on over his back. So he is on board, but not all right, it is quite possible he may pull away a batten to-night. He is busy carpentering, and has already got one spar off. I would prefer his going overboard to looking me up in my bunk.
It blew all night, so we all rested and had European breakfast at leisure at nine. I did a picture of a bear I saw yesterday, Archie’s bear. It is munching the head of a young hooded-seal, Cystophora Cristata, of which we saw over forty in one lot yesterday. I also did a picture, from notes at the time, of the jolly lonely bear playing with a piece of drift-wood, lying on its back and tossing away the wood with his hind foot, just before he got up, suspecting there was something in the wind, and before going off over the floe down wind at that easy gait that leaves poor man such miles behind whenever there is soft snow to negotiate.