WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 183 



De Gisbert has picked up several stranded sealers, on his 

 previous expeditions north; a lot of these set out in poor 

 vessels with no equipment ; for fur-hunting, for blue fox, 

 bear and seal skins ; and they often came to grief. A party 

 of four wintered in Spitzbergen, badly provisioned, and when 

 he fell in with them, one lay dead, a second was in the last 

 stage of scurvy, and the other two were barely able to come 

 on board and tell their tale. De Gisbert took the sick man 

 and isolated him and a distinguished doctor on board said 

 he had not a chance of life, half his face was gone. He asked 

 for beer, and the doctor said : " Give him as much as he likes 

 to drink. He is a dead man. " So he got that light Norwegian 

 ol, more and more of it ; he drank one hundred and fifty-six 

 bottles in five days, and recovered ! 



Another troublesome sealer he took home had gone crazy 

 on board a small boat on its outward voyage. De Gisbert 

 hails all sealers and gives them tobacco and their longitude 

 and latitude, and possibly a bottle of whisky, all of which 

 things they are generally quite without as often as not they 

 carry neither sextant nor chronometer. He was asked to take 

 this man who had gone crazy back to Norway, and as Gisbert 

 was on his way south, to save them their season's sealing, he 

 humanely did so. The man partially recovered and was let 

 loose, and messed forward, in the fo'c'sle. But suddenly 

 one day, at meal-time, he went mad again and cleared every- 

 one out of the fo'c'sle with a knife in his hand ; and they had 

 to lasso him through the fo'c'sle skylight ! Naturally they 

 put into the first Norwegian village they came to up north 

 and asked the police to take over the lunatic ; but the police 

 besought Gisbert to take him on to Hammerfest and they 

 would telegraph and have him met there. He did so, much 

 to his own loss of time, and at Hammerfest one small boy 

 came off in a boat to take, single-handed, the raving lunatic, 

 who required two strong men and a strait jacket : he died 

 two days after. 



De Gisbert talks of his plans for this coming Spanish 

 Polar expedition and finds the writer a sympathetic listener, 

 for have we not worried ourselves over similar troubles, the 

 raising capital and planning of an expedition to the FarSouth ? 



