208 WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 



There is a Norwegian fishery for these sharks, for the oil 

 contained in their livers, which is used largely in commerce 

 as cod liver oil ; chemically it is exactly the same. These 

 sharks are too big to pull on board the fishing-boats, so they 

 are only hauled alongside, when the liver is cut out and the 

 stomach is blown up with air, and stitched up ; so they go off 

 on the surface ; if they went deep down their relatives would 

 eat them and neglect the Norwegians' baits. The vitality of 

 this shark's flesh tissue is remarkable. After this one had 

 lost its whole machinery, its flesh still lived, and after its 

 head was off, both flesh and head moved. A seal I shot 

 this morning, after rather an interesting stalk over soft 

 snow and blue lakes, shot clean through the brain, showed 

 the heart beating a long time after. 



I once wrote rather a lurid and perhaps too colourful 

 a picture of seal-killing, in the South, and the paragraph has 

 been made use of by people who will not eat flesh, but wear 

 boots, and they showed how cruel sealers were, and wished 

 to stop them killing seals honest fellows, risking their lives 

 in Antarctic ice and Newfoundland floes to keep their wives 

 and children in life at home. The seal may lose its brain 

 with a crashing shot and then its skin and fat for olive oil, 

 or for our chair-seats, shoes and salads, but that it feels 

 pain after the shock, or that the sealers are to blame, I 

 deny. 



Our port white bear at any rate approves of the seal and 

 shark killing ; he hates the wooden cage, but doesn't he 

 swallow the seal's blubber which we squeeze between the 

 battens, and he simply laps up the sharks' foie gras in heaps. 

 He gave me such a scare this morning ; I had forgotten his 

 presence and was counting the toes on a seal's hind foot for 

 pictorial purposes and examining the formation of the dead 

 bears' heads quite close to his cage, when he let out a roar 

 within an inch of my ear. I confess I was startled ! He is 

 only three to four years old, still he probably weighs well over 

 three hundred pounds and has a voice according. 



To shoot a seal this morning I used De Gisbert's telescope- 

 sighted mauser rifle, a new experience, the accuracy is mar- 

 vellous and up here that is necessary, as seals are wary. Down 



