If there happens to be one of the pale blue ice ponds just beyond them, then you see them white against it distinctly, and the blue is reflected under their bodies as they stand beside the pool, or when they rise and flit over it it shines under their wings. They always stand bills up wind, as if they had come from somewhere and expected something, but are not particularly anxious about it. They do not seem to be excited about the flesh we throw into the snow at this early hour; later they all start to eat it at once. The fulmars seem to eat all the time. These yellowish white birds with chalky-grey and brown wings are always with us, round our stern, battling ever about scraps of seals’ blubber; there is quite a homely farm-door sound about their cluck, cluck. Seamen say they are reincarnated souls of men lost at sea—rather a far-fetched idea, to my mind. Then there comes a Richardson’s skua. We need a specimen for Edinburgh Museum, so I drop it on the floe with no compunction; it is the sea-birds’ pirate and has a touch of the cuckoo’s plumage under its wings. It neither reaps nor sows, simply lives by cheek. When a simple fulmar has filled itself with what it can get, fish or fowls or little cuttle-fish and minute shrimps, by dint of hard work and early rising, then by comes Mr Skua of quick flight, and ingeniously attacks the fulmar from behind and underneath, till it disgorges its breakfast and the skua catches it up before it reaches the water!
Though our ice-scape is very remote and far afield, and subdued in sound and in colour, there is a great deal going on. At the floe-edge there are reddish shrimps in the clear cold water, and if you take some of the water in a glass, you will see still more minute crustaceans, a joy of delicate coloured armour under the microscope. And there is inorganic life amongst the ice; a blue block has just come sweeping past very slowly—it is like blue and white muslin. But big life, bar our three selves on deck this morning, there seems to be none. All the rest of our crowd are sound asleep below decks. I think they should be up and doing, for the sky is lifting and the snow ceased and there is more and more animation amongst our bird neighbours. The ivory gulls find it is breakfast-time and suddenly set to work, pecking at pieces of meat they barely glanced at an hour ago. There is a promise of movement—possibly of our finding a way through the purple leads, through these sheets of ice-floes to Greenland in the west. Yes, there is more colour now, the white night is changing almost unnoticeably, and the ivory gulls begin to call before they take another flight (they speak just like our sea-swallows or terns, a tweet, tweet). On first seeing an ivory gull you are not greatly impressed; it is simply an entirely white gull. But you recall Arctic travellers mentioning it, and the little pause they make after its name; and when you see them yourself you realise what that means ... that little creamy white body that reflects the grey of the sea under its wing, or the blue in the pool on ice-floes, its inconsequent floating white flight is the very soul of the Arctic. As closely associated with the ice-edge there is another white bird in the Antarctic, the snowy petrel, a delicate white spirit bird, a never-to-be-forgotten touch of white delicacy in the almost awful beauty of the Antarctic floe-edge, a small bird, white and soft as a snow-flake, flitting amongst white and Doric ruins on the edge of a lonely sea. Here the white counterpart is a larger, a more material creature on the edge of a shallower, less impressive ice-pack, but the kinship is there.
How I wish it was breakfast-time! two more hours before our “much too strong she-cook” will give us frokost.
At this point in these meditations we came across another bear; we had let go our floe and were heading north-west, the day clearing (bump! that was ice), when we spotted him on a small floe, across which he sped at a good speed. At first we thought it was small enough to take with lasso and keep alive, so we chased it, but it proved on close acquaintance to be an old she-bear, and far too big and strong to rope, so we dispatched it with my 38 Colt pistol with one shot in the centre of its white head at ten yards, which killed it stone dead, much to the astonishment of crew, who had no idea of what a pistol can do. Not an hour later, still before the longed-for breakfast, we spotted a big bear on a floe to windward, just five minutes after our watch was up, so it came in the watch of Don Luis Velasquez, who came on at nine o’clock.
It was fascinating, watching the great beast with the glass as it sauntered to and fro on the floe, a seal lay on the floe not far out of the line from windward, and we fondly hoped to see the bear stalk it, but before it quite crossed the line of scent, and when not a hundred yards from the seal, he evidently thought he would like forty winks, so he shovelled himself a lair in the snow and turned in, but it was not quite to his liking, so he got up and looked towards us, and either did not see our rigging or did not mind it and lay down again, so that we only saw his great yellowish back above a snow ridge. So Gisbert and Don Luis had time for a tiny whisky-and-soda, but no breakfast, and set out with a large camp-following, and we others went on with coffee and bear-steak, and at our leisure went to the bridge and watched their long walk over snow ridges and wreaths and blue-water pools. The ice-bear looked up when they were about two hundred yards distant and began to come towards them, then thought there were too many, and retired. He was pretty well peppered by both rifles before he gave in, fifteen to twenty-five shots we heard—the account varies, but he was hit several times. When you are by yourself, or with only another man, the bear will face you and come to the attack, so you get a better chance than when it is inclined to retire, as it did in this case. This was another male of large size. I made a jotting of him before he yawned and lay down to sleep, he probably had breakfasted—at least he did not notice the seal distant from him about twenty yards.
There is much bumping to-day—floes are heavy and close and we have to charge some which makes the splinters fly from our sheathing of hard wood. It seems more hopeless than ever to reach the North Greenland coast. The floes are so large and numerous, we fear that even did we do so, a little easterly wind might hem us in on the coast against land ice, where we might have to stay indefinitely. Still, two days may alter the aspect of ice entirely: Svendsen details all this to us with the stump of a pencil on the white wood of our new captive’s cage to which he puts his black nose and ivory teeth and crushes splinters, now and then using his claws. He must know us all now, but they naturally are not very friendly yet and the deep, musical vibration of their growls coming right aft from the waist, sound sometimes a little like curses “not loud but deep.” We can stand that, but when the note changes to something like “For the Lord’s sake let me out,” to freedom and the wide floe, we have to harden our hearts and think of little children at home.
At lunch we talk bear and other sport and Arctic cachés. The last a subject that is fascinating. The first I ever heard of was from one of Leigh Smith’s men of the Eira. We were in the tropics, he was steering when he spoke of it, with longing. He had wintered with Leigh Smith in Franz Josef Land before that part became popular, and as he steered he told me how, before leaving for their forty days’ voyage in an open boat to Norway (they had lost their ship in an ice squeeze), they buried the spare rifles, musical instruments, and champagne. How one’s teeth watered as we heard of these “beakers, cooled a long age in the deep delved” snow, and little did my companion Bruce or I ever think we would be near that caché; but five years later Bruce was up there, and found the rifles, musical-boxes and champagne bottles were there, just as described, but alas the bottles were burst! Gisbert tells me he also saw the same caché ten years later, and he knows of a finer one still, still untouched by the A⸺ Z⸺ expedition. It is also in Franz Josef Land—a cave in rock, blasted out, and covered with a timber door so thick that not all the polar bears in the Arctic, good carpenters as they are, could open it. That is the Duke d’Abruzzi’s caché, and there are others; one, I think, on Shannon Island, which we aim at getting to and which we will add to, if not in need of provisions, and draw on if we are in distress. The idea is to add to such a store if you can, for the benefit of anyone really in need. It is a wicked thing, however, to draw on a caché, excepting in case of being in want of the necessaries for existence. I have had one pilfered in the barrens of Newfoundland of tea and sugar, raisins, chocolate and such luxuries, the necessaries, flour and hard tack, being left untouched. Were the man found who did this, his life would be made a burden to him through the breadth of Newfoundland.
But to come back to our ice-bears. I have lately, and at other times, heard many stories about them, and the more I see of them the more do I believe about their strength, and timidity, their fierce courage, and docility. One bear does one thing, the next the opposite. One dies with two or three bullets whilst running away, the next eats them up, advancing to the attack.
Gisbert’s closest contact, bar the occasion before mentioned with the young bear, was quite exciting and unexpected. He left the ship one day to verify the height of a mountain in Franz Josef Land, which he had previously calculated from sea—went up a steep ice-fall with ski in tow and got to near the top, when a fierce gale, with snow, started. Following the bear’s plan, he looked for a hole to slip into, found such a shelter, and crawled in. By the faint blue light coming through the ice roof and sides of the cave he discovered a great bear, with its black nose resting on its folded paws and its dark eyes looking at him with a kindly expression. He did not trust the expression, but, keeping his eyes steadily on the bear’s, he gently pulled his rifle forward, and without lifting it, with his thumb pushed back the safety bolt, and slowly brought forward the muzzle to the bear’s ear and pulled, and so Gisbert lived to tell the tale. It sounds a moderately tall story, but after many others I have heard, and even from what I have seen lately, it does not sound so wonderful as it may to one who has not been at “this end of the garden.” When the gale blew over, some of the crew came up to his signal, and three all told, slid down the slope on the white bear’s body, at the foot it was, of course, deprived of its skin; when you think of it, the whole proceeding seems rather hard on the bear.
