WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 253 



serious old bear- stalk : " Give me a pheasant cover, with 

 nothing on four legs bigger than a spaniel." You don't 

 then have that sensation of cold water : you are quite com- 

 fortable and can claw down your birds and chat with any 

 fair one who has begged to see you do it. 



From above, the careful reader may gather that we have at 

 least in this Greenland sea seen the sun. It is nice ! Now, 

 as I write, about twelve o'clock midnight, it may be said to 

 be shining; and in the rays, with double winter clothing, 

 it is really quite warm. But in the shade there are many 

 degrees of frost ; that is why the icicles hang so beautifully 

 to-day over the blue ledges on the shaded side of the raised 

 edges on the floes. 



It is a poor floe and feeble ice compared to that in the 

 South. We passed a berg this afternoon, an Arctic berg, so 

 we said : " How grand ! " But in my mind I saw again the 

 stupendous ice- cliffs of the South and their vast green caves, 

 into which you could pack a dozen such Arctic iceberg chips. 



The atmosphere and colouring here remind me of the east 

 coast of Scotland in June, clear, crystalline, unenveloping, 

 quite unlike the velvety feeling of our west, towards the 

 Gulf Stream, say down the Wigtownshire coast, or the west 

 of Spain. 



I have often seen this scenery depicted in old whaling 

 pictures, where the ships and whalers look quite large in 

 proportion to the ice-forms. This is the difference between 

 Arctic and Antarctic. In one, man and his vessels dominate 

 the scene, in the other the great forms of nature make man 

 and his works seem very small. 



This afternoon with my pistol I shot an old female seal 

 through the brain this after a futile stalk of hours for a seal 

 in the morning with long-range rifle and telescope sight. 



Though we can't find whales yet, the colour of the water is 

 promising ; it is full of plankton : if you draw a muslin 

 net through it you collect in a few yards, in the tail of the 

 bag, an almost transparent jelly a minute quantity of 

 which, examined under the microscope, reveals marvellous 

 beauty, millions of minute crustaceans and diatoms that fill 

 you with wonder at the life in the seas, which infinitely 



