WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 257 



there are no whales and because our path west and south 

 and north is barred with ice. Perhaps by the middle of 

 August there may be a road open to the land. We have seen 

 the mist on the hills, at any rate a wide stretch of many 

 miles of whitish light thrown up to the sky, which tells us 

 that the land is there and that we are not more than fifty 

 or sixty miles distant from it. 



We still hope to get the she-bear and the cubs ; they 

 are nice small cubs, not like the well-grown wicked fellows 

 we have on board ; we could almost make pets of these 

 small fellows. 



A man we know of got one a year or two ago. He was 

 one of three Norwegians left on a certain island in these 

 latitudes we will not give its exact bearings to collect 

 skins during a winter. They got a hundred bearskins and 

 ninety white fox of considerable value, and they are there 

 still in barrels, and ought to be quite good yet. They lost 

 their boat and were picked up and taken home. They had 

 a baby bear, which they brought up on the bottle. It was 

 a charming pet till about twelve months old and then he had 

 to be destroyed or he would have killed them in play. 



I am sorry to say here that at middays-mad we, aft the 

 mainmast, had not remembered this was Sunday till pancakes 

 came on the table. As the second lot arrived the steward 

 stepped in rather quietly and whispered: "A seal astern," 

 so we jumped out with the pistol (by what some might call 

 a lucky shot), hit it through the brain and it floated dead, 

 and a white ivory gull hung over it. It was just the kind of 

 skin, too, I wanted for the projected motoring coat. Then 

 we realised it was Sunday, and to make up leeway we dis- 

 played bunting, the Royal Spanish Yachting Club and our 

 Royal Eastern Yacht Club the vice-commodore's and the 

 Red Lion of Scotland (the origin of which is buried in the 

 mist of historical obscurity) at the fore, quite a gallant 

 display for such short notice. 



With the flags' first flutter the air went round to the north, 

 and now, instead of being heavy and depressing, there is a 

 bracing feeling, and the eye can see far and wide amongst the 

 lanes of sea-water and the floes of hummocky ice. Harp 



