54 WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 



surges come over our bow and we sit in the tiny galley, 

 Henriksen, styrmand, mechanicien and myself, and St 

 Ebba rolls dishes, pots and pans all about. But what care 

 we, reeling off eight to nine knots against wind with little 

 or no water in our waist ; an ordinary tramp at three knots 

 against the same tumble of sea would be half under water. 



Night falls, the Plough lights up, and our pole mast and 

 crow's nest and steamer light go swinging against it. 



We ought to sight Fair Isle and Sumburgh Light and 

 Bressay Light, Lerwick, to-night about twelve. The breeze 

 is northerly and for these parts the air is clear and chilly and 

 bracing, giving the energy of the northern electrical condition 

 that we cannot explain but which we know does exist. 



We overhauled all our charts this morning in the little 

 cabin after marking our position a pleasing pastime ; charts 

 are better pictures than the most valued engravings if you 

 have fancy enough to see coral islands and waving palms 

 where are only copper-plate engraved lines. Our Arctic 

 charts we roll away in the very centre of our other charts, 

 for alas, we are now months too late for Davis Straits : the 

 polar bears and white whales and Arctic poppies and the 

 bees humming in the white heather we must visit some other 

 time. These are the happy regions the old whalers speak 

 of with glistening eyes as they recall the joys, the hauls of 

 salmon in nets, the reindeer flesh, and the Right whale hunt- 

 ing. No, no long sunny nights for us this journey. Possibly 

 there will be room for some such description further on in 

 this book, perhaps of whaling and sealing by the light of the 

 midnight sun in the Antarctic or the Arctic. 



We must make the best of this northern latitude and get 

 braced up a little with Shetland, which is astonishingly 

 bracing, before going south again. A dip into its cold, salt, 

 crystalline water as you get out of bed is a better tonic than 

 quinine for fever ; and against the grey skies and grey houses 

 of Lerwick and its pale, yellow-haired and kindly people we 

 will picture before us the blue of the south, say the hot side 

 of Madeira with the brown, bare-legged grape-pickers, the 

 sugar cane and the deep blue sea or the hot volcanic dust and 

 fruit at the Azores, the Canaries and Cape Verde, and the 



