The steward, Pedersen, was pathetic to-day about the vivandière, he noted a chip in a cup at breakfast and gazed at it mournfully and sighed: “She is so mush too sdrong dis she-cook of ours.” She is strong, and red-cheeked, it is true, and very beamy and has a laugh and a word for everyone. She was one of the few who were not sick coming over from Norway, and though so broad and strong, she nipped about between the seas like an A.B., and laughed when the cold sea-water came up to her knees. I back Norwegian she-cooks against the field.
I have written down what a tricky musician is this steward, he keeps a music shop in Trömso in winter, his wife and kinderen look after it in summer, when the midnight sun appears, then he attends princes and humble people like ourselves, who go in search of whales, or adventures; or scientific data to this “end of the garden,” where you have sun and winter in midsummer, fog, snow, drifting ice-floes, sun, heat, cold, huge energy, a great deal of beauty, and astounding repose. But why this restfulness here? we all did at least eight to ten hours last night. Neither the writer, nor De Gisbert, nor some others of our party ever do so much at a spell down South. And at any time in the twenty-four hours one can be awake or go to sleep with equal facility—appetites go up wonderfully, we simply wade through bear steak. I noticed the smallest of our Spanish friends, who would blush to face a whole egg in Madrid on a July morning, calmly got outside four this morning, each with its slice of bear; he has slept a good deal since. We consider that he is a pucca shikari and also a born actor; it is pure joy to watch his movements of hands and face and body as he and Gisbert jestingly argue out a subject. He told us last night how the wine tasters in South Spain can throw a glass of wine into the air in a thin stream, and catch it all in the glass again as it falls. You see he is showing how it is done. He threw up a glass of pontet canet, but instead of falling back into the glass it all went down his neck and wrist. We laughed some, then he dried himself and went on to show us something else, every now and then popping his head out at the cabin door to see if anything was stirring on the ice-floes.
Some of my friends plan making a great sanatorium up in these latitudes on claims which we have pegged out in Spitzbergen, so that people who cling to life may go there to get rid of tubercular complaints. There is not an atom of a germ there, so people with chest complaints recover there on the land. But you can have persistent colds on board a vessel, I suppose because of germs belonging to it. Some vessels seem to breed a plentiful supply. I know a vessel that carries colds for all hands on every trip. It is, I believe, somewhat similar with scurvy.
We got a very ugly brown shark this morning, one of those deep-sea Arctic sharks (Squalus Borealis) that do not follow ships, but live away down fifty fathoms deep and possibly eat cod. Why he came up it is hard to say; possibly he scented seal. We welcomed him with a harpoon as he swam alongside, and got a running bowline round his tail, and slung him alongside, head down, till he nearly died. He was only ten feet eight inches, a rough brown ugly beggar, not so fierce-looking or active as those blue sharks we killed last year, off the Azores, for eating our sperm-whale blubber. There is a Norwegian fishery for these sharks, for the oil contained in their livers, which is used largely in commerce as cod liver oil; chemically it is exactly the same. These sharks are too big to pull on board the fishing-boats, so they are only hauled alongside, when the liver is cut out and the stomach is blown up with air, and stitched up; so they go off on the surface; if they went deep down their relatives would eat them and neglect the Norwegians’ baits. The vitality of this shark’s flesh tissue is remarkable. After this one had lost its whole machinery, its flesh still lived, and after its head was off, both flesh and head moved. A seal I shot this morning, after rather an interesting stalk over soft snow and blue lakes, shot clean through the brain, showed the heart beating a long time after.
I once wrote rather a lurid and perhaps too colourful a picture of seal-killing, in the South, and the paragraph has been made use of by people who will not eat flesh, but wear boots, and they showed how cruel sealers were, and wished to stop them killing seals—honest fellows, risking their lives in Antarctic ice and Newfoundland floes to keep their wives and children in life at home. The seal may lose its brain with a crashing shot and then its skin and fat for olive oil, or for our chair-seats, shoes and salads, but that it feels pain after the shock, or that the sealers are to blame, I deny.
Our port white bear at any rate approves of the seal and shark killing; he hates the wooden cage, but doesn’t he swallow the seal’s blubber which we squeeze between the battens, and he simply laps up the sharks’ foie gras in heaps. He gave me such a scare this morning; I had forgotten his presence and was counting the toes on a seal’s hind foot for pictorial purposes and examining the formation of the dead bears’ heads quite close to his cage, when he let out a roar within an inch of my ear. I confess I was startled! He is only three to four years old, still he probably weighs well over three hundred pounds and has a voice according.
Arctic Shark, Squalus Borealis
Photo by C. A. Hamilton