WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 73 



never a whale, so the Sabbath is devoted to the melodeon 

 and painting. We have a book to read but the cloud pictures 

 and their reflections always take our eyes from the print. 



So we live on a whaler, in old clothes, seldom changed. 

 I think we rather affect worn, patched clothes. Our cook 

 or steward, a man of means, I have no doubt, in his own 

 country, has a faded blue jersey, the darning of which must 

 have pleasingly occupied many of the few hours of leisure 

 he has on board, and the men, too, have most artistic patches 

 on their clothes. They differ from their superior the skipper 

 in that their coats are torn and darned, and his is torn and 

 not darned. The writer's is neither, but will be shortly, and 

 the crease in the trousers is a memory ; it goes soon on a 

 whaler, where you waste no time changing clothes certainly 

 not oftener than once a week. But, though we are roughly 

 clad, we have Grieg's music, rye bread, and whale meat, 

 luxuries we often have to do without on shore ; the black- 

 bread Socialists will have none of it, and the meat for which 

 the Japs, even for the fat, pay twenty-five cents a pound. 



The melodeon player's biography would make good MS. 

 He is young and big, weaned from shore to sea by his skipper 

 father at thirteen ; master's certificate at seventeen ; then 

 mate on a sailing ship to the Colonies ; master and gunner 

 on a Japanese whaler ; twenty pounds a month ; seven 

 pounds for each whale and all found ; large pay in Norway ; 

 purchaser of his own island ; farm, wife, three children ; a 

 sixteen-hand fast trotter, sleighs, guns, rifles ; six months on 

 shore ; six at sea ; youth and exuberant spirits and as keen 

 about securing a guillemot for the pot as for a four-hundred- 

 pound sterling Nord Capper. . . . The day passes and it 

 seems as hopeless as ever, but I find Henriksen knows some 

 useful fo'c'sle language for the relief of feelings ; it gives a 

 little lurid colour to the otherwise monotonous soft pigeon- 

 grey landscape. 



For hours at a time the fascination of watching the horizon 

 for a blow is enough to keep one's mind fully occupied, but 

 at length and at last the writer begins to count painting and 

 reading as of equal interest a deplorable state of affairs. 

 It is almost hopeless, from a whaling point of view, so we are 



