FIRST GRINNELL EXPEDITION. 359 



skating-ground and admirable slides. I walked regu- 

 larly over the floes, although the snows were nearly 

 impassable. With all this, aided by hosts of hygienic 

 resources, feeble, certainly, but still the best at my 

 command, scurvy advanced steadily. ' ; 



On the 21st April Dr. Kane encountered a bear on the 

 ice, on which he remarks : " We are at least eighty 

 miles from the nearest land, Cape Kater ; and channels 

 innumerable must intervene between us and terra firma. 

 Yet this majestic animal, dependent upon his own pred- 

 atory resources alone, and, defying cold as well as hun- 

 ger, guided by a superb instinct, confides himself to 

 these solitary, unstable ice-fields. 



"Parry, in his adventurous polar effort, found these 

 animals at the most northern limit of recorded observa- 

 tion. Wrangell had them as companions on his first 

 Asiatic journey over the Polar Ocean. Navigators have 

 also found them floating upon berg and floe far out in 

 open sea ; and here we have them in a region some 

 seventy miles from the nearest stable ice. They have 

 seldom or never if we except Parry's Spitsbergen 

 experience been seen so far from land. In the great 

 majority of cases, they seem to have been accidentally 

 caught and carried adrift on disengaged ice-floes. In 

 this way they travel to Iceland ; and it may have been 

 so, perhaps, with the Spitzbergen instances. 



" There is something very grand about this tawny 

 savage : never leaving this utter destitution, this frigid 

 inhospitableness ; coupling in May, and bringing forth 

 in Ohiistmas time ; a gestation carried on all of it 

 below zero, more than half of it in Arctic darkness ; 

 living in perpetual snow, and dependent for life upon a 

 never-ending activity ; using the frozen water as a raft 

 to traverse the open seas, that the water unfrozen may 

 yield him the means of life. No time for hibernation 

 has this polar tiger ; his life is one great winter." 



