260 WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 



To put in time I took a boat after a hooded-seal, which I 

 spotted through a lift in the sunny haze about a mile off 

 on a small floe. We excuse ourselves killing seals by thinking 

 of the benefit we confer on our fellow-men in the South by 

 adding to the general store of material used in the manu- 

 facture of margarine and olive oil ; but besides this base 

 commercial consideration we have our captive bears to 

 consider, they must exist, to afford amusement and in- 

 struction some day in our Zoological Park in Edinburgh, 

 London, or Madrid. As I approached, the seal finally shovelled 

 himself off the snow into the sea and disappeared. Trusting 

 to its showing some curiosity, we waited, and it came up 

 about a hundred yards off, and showed part of its head, 

 which I managed to hit, but it disappeared. So we waited 

 about the place, and by-and-by it came up only about twenty 

 yards away, when a shot from the pistol finished its pain. 

 In my experience it is a very rare thing for a seal to re- 

 appear after being wounded or killed. I must disagree with 

 Sir Ernest Shackleton in this matter. He said in a lecture 

 to our Royal Geographical Society apropos of Antarctic 

 seals: "As fast as we killed them, up they came again." 



It is a strange life this up North, a little while ago mist 

 and cold, and you longed to be home wherever that might 

 be and now the sun is shining hot, and you might be in a 

 yacht off Aberdeen in summer; it is the same crystalline 

 atmosphere, with cold air, hot sun, but bracing very nice 

 indeed ! But up here there is some risk ! only two hours 

 ago we were in a tight place. No real old Arctic whaler 

 would mention this ; they all minimise dangers for their own 

 comfort ; if they did not, they would end in staying on shore 

 and going to the workhouse. But the writer, who is only 

 an amateur whaler who " only plays hide-and-seek with the 

 sea," as a nephew of mine puts it, may be allowed to say that 

 there was grave danger, and putting aside whale and bear 

 dangers, there was in this one of our first really nice, sunny 

 evenings, a very serious prospect of our spending the last 

 few months of our lives on a floe with a failing commissariat. 

 We ran ourselves on to a green ice tongue that we thought 

 had enough water over it to float us, and got fast. I was 



