Ti.J THE POLAR BEAR. Ill 



bear, whom these '' courageous " men finally killed, after a rather 

 severe struggle. 



A large number of occurrences of a similar nature, though 

 commonly attended with fortunate results, are to be found 

 recorded in most of the narratives of Arctic travel. Thus 

 a sailor was once carried off from a whaler caught in the ice 

 in Davis' Straits, and in 1820, among the drift-ice in the 

 sea between Greenland and Spitzbergen, the same fate was 

 like to befall one of the crew of a Hull whaler; but he succeeded 

 in effecting his escape by taking to flight, and throwing to the 

 bear, first his only weapon of defence, a lance, and then his 

 articles of clothing, one after the other.^ On the 6th of March 

 1870, Dr. Boergen was attacked by a bear, and dragged a 

 considerable distance.- It is remarkable that the bear did not 

 this time either kill his prey, but that he had time to cry out, 

 '■' A bear is dragging me away ; " and that, after the bear had 

 dragged him several hundred yards and he had got free, he 

 could, though very badly scalped, himself make his way back to 

 the vessel. The scalping had been done by the bear attempting 

 to crush the skull in its mouth, as it is accustomed to do to the 

 seals it catches. Scoresby considers it dangerous to hunt the 

 Polar bear in deep snow. The well-known Dane, C. Petersen, 

 guide to McClintock, Kane and others, on the other hand, 

 considered it as little dangerous to attack a bear as to slaughter 

 a sheep. The Siberian traveller, Hedenstrom, says that a man 

 may venture to do so with a knife tied to a walking-stick, and 

 the Norwegian hunters, or at least the Norwegian-Finnish 

 harpooners, express themselves in much the same way regarding 

 " this noble and dangerous " sport. 



The bear's principal food consists of the seal and walrus. 

 It is said that with a single stroke of his powerful paw he can 

 cast a walrus up on the ice. On the other hand he seldom 

 succeeds in catching the reindeer, because it is fleeter than the 

 bear. I have, however, in North East Land, on two occasions, 

 seen blood and hair of reindeer which had been caught by bears. 

 There is not the least doubt that, along with flesh, the bear also 

 eats vegetable substances, as seaweed, grass, and lichens. I 

 have several times, on examining the stomach of a bear that 

 had been shot, found in it only remains of vegetable substances; 

 and the Avalrus-hunters know this so well that they called a 

 large old Polar bear, which Dr. Theel shot at Port Dickson in 

 1875, " an old Land-king" that was too fat to go a hunting, and 

 therefore ate grass on land. He makes use besides of food of 

 many different kinds ; a bear, for instance, in the winter 1865-66 



1 \V. Scoresby's des Jiingern, TagehvcJt einpr Reiite auf deni Wall fisch fang . 

 Aus dem engl. iiehers, Hamburg, 1825, p. 127. 



- Die zweite deutsche Ncrdpolarfahrt, Vol. I. p. 465. 



