Modern Whaling & Bear-Hunting / A record of present-day whaling with up-to-date appliances in many parts of the world, and of bear and seal hunting in the Arctic regions

by W. G. Burn Murdoch

A Modern Steam Whaler

The harpoon has just struck a Whale. The Dolphins give a sense of proportion of the Finner Whale.

From an Oil Painting by the Author

To shoot a seal this morning I used De Gisbert’s telescope-sighted mauser rifle, a new experience, the accuracy is marvellous and up here that is necessary, as seals are wary. Down South you pat them on the head if you like before you shoot; they do not mind your presence in the least. I find wading stockings are perhaps better than sea-boots for these melting floes, as you go sometimes over the knees, in the blue water pools and in the soft snow. Also you can turn them inside out to dry, which you can’t do to sea-boots.

The seal was fairly large and had three or four awful gashes, of a foot or two in length, which were put down to either a bear’s teeth or claws.

It snows to-night—it is dead calm, broad daylight, but cold and no sun visible, floes all round and our hopes are going down; we fear we may never see Greenland’s icy mountains and the saxifrages and poppies that I have set my heart on seeing. So we sat and sat in the silence and made belief that time was passing all right, and quite enjoyed a small excitement. A squeak—I would not call it a squeal—from our “too-strong she-cook.” She was cutting up a piece of shark for our dinner, and suddenly noticed that it responded to her touch—sentience of matter, you may call it. I felt it was most unpleasing for some reason—it was quite white flesh like halibut, and lay in a small block on the bulwark rail, and when you touched it it gave a squirm or movement of say a quarter to half an inch. We all collected round; and at supper we ate it, some of us did—I did not—at least only the tiniest morsel. It began to feel rather dull, so I suggested to Gisbert we should get the foils out and we would fence on deck in the falling snow, and Archie would photograph us and we would send the result to “Lescrime,” and we were just buttoning up our leather jackets for the fray, when young Don Luis Velasquez put his glass up at our cabin door and spotted a bear on a small floe not three hundred yards away, eating seal. We thought it was probably the sealskin and blubber of my morning’s seal, which we had let go adrift, owing to the sores the bear’s claws had left on it, making it dangerous for the hands engaged to skin it. Pusey finger we called the wounds in the Antarctic which we got from cutting up seals that had been torn by a grampus. Though colds are rare in Arctic regions, and consumption is said not to exist, yet often sores take long to heal; cuts on the hands, for example, often take a long time to grow fresh skin.

So our quiet Sabbath evening became all excitement, and we dived for rifle, pistol, and lasso; the lasso because we could see the bear was not full grown, possibly a three-year-old, and we hoped we might get it alive. As we raced down—four oars in the whale-boat—I endeavoured to get some of the frozen stiffness out of the rope and got it into coils in the bow, and before I had completely done so, we were down wind and near the bear. It stared at us and made rather a sudden and alarming approach to the floe-edge, as if it intended to come on board. I expected to lasso it on the ice, but it plunged into the sea and came up within ten yards. At the first throw the loop dropped neatly round its head and sank a little, and a hard pull and a turn round the bollard or timber-head in the bow made the bear fast. Cheers from the men and roars from the bear, and Gisbert’s congratulations; he was surprised at such a cast from his pupil. (But he was not half so surprised as I was.) It was very pretty as it stood looking at our approach in the boat, faint yellow, darker than snow; two black tashes for eyes, one for nose and two dark marks for ears, and the red of the seal’s flesh and skin on the snow—very simple colours, very delicate pale emerald-green and blue on the ice. When it came running at us it was too picturesque! We towed it alongside the ship, gnashing its teeth and roaring, where it swam about, expressing its disgust, in language I dare not quote, at the rope round its neck and its inability to tow the ship away. It may be too big and strong for us to manage on board—probably measures eight feet from nose to heel and is three to four years old; six-month cubs are what we can handle more easily, and even at that age they are wonderfully strong. Gisbert told me he lassoed a cub, and was throwing an extra hitch round its forearm, when it got alongside him, put one hand on his chest, and he went down like grass, and he is short and very strong, and is quite fourteen stone; he got his arm rather badly bitten. All hands set to work to make another strong timber cage, and they had it done almost before I had made a picture of the bear as it looked at us approaching in the boat, and long before Ursus showed any fatigue from swimming and roaring.

Then there was wild work in the boat getting the strop round its waist—oaths and foam, and flying ropes—donkey-engine—roars from the bear—shouts from the men—steam, and bear’s hot breath, all mixed up. But out it came, only as strong perhaps as two or three wild horses, and we managed to drop it into the top of the cage, hauling its head down with the lasso rove through the bottom bars of the cage, and banged down battens on top, with great eight-inch nails driven in, by six or seven strong Vikings, Gisbert leading and having all they could do. Then we cut the lasso and he was free of the loop in a second or two. So we have two live bears now, possibly polar cousins. The first is to port, the second to starboard of main-hatch, and their deep voices give a strong accompaniment to our progression. They have no qualms about eating; they tear the timber of their cage and eat seal’s fat from our hand alternately.

It is my early watch to-day, three A.M. to nine A.M., till welcome coffee-time. There is nothing doing, no whale’s spout and no bears appear. Still one never knows, so Olaus paces the foredeck with his hands deep in his pockets and Larsen works away quietly at the bear meat, taking off every bit of the fat, so that it will be good for our table. I write in our little chart-room on the bridge, with a view all round of floes of ice extending right round the horizon; we are anchored to one—in its shelter. The wind is falling and it is very quiet; there is the lap, lap of the small waves against the green edge of the floe, the tweet, tweet of some ivory gulls, and the homely barn-door-fowl-like cluck, cluck of the fulmar petrels, as they squabble and splutter under the stern for scraps of food, not forgetting the frequent low, deep growls of the bear we lassoed last night. His companion, our first capture, is asleep, possibly dreaming that it is free, poor fellow! So I study my immediate surroundings without interruption. A flight of ivory gulls has just come and has lit beside us on the floe. They are white as this paper and yet not quite so white as snow; they have dark beaks and feet and black eyes, so what you see when they stand in order on the pinkish white snow is a series of almost invisibly yellowish white upright sort of sea-birds, which you would not notice at all, but for their dark legs and eyes and bills.