282 WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 



I have always heard the Arctic likened to atmospheric 

 champagne, where men's spirits are said to be high and colds 

 exist not. Well, all I can say is that in this particular vessel 

 in these latitudes (there again, there's someone else sneez- 

 ing) there are many such complaints, and smells ! Hamilton 

 says " The look of the sea suggests a smell." It suggests to 

 me London on a November morning. Sea and air are so 

 stagnant and cold, you could lean against the icy smell of 

 our bears or kitchen, and a cigar whiff almost strikes you. 



When the sun got up we steered away east and south a 

 hundred and forty miles we have yet to go, to get out of ice 

 into the open sea, " the rough highway to freedom and 

 to peace," as Morris puts in his Jason, and all day we passed 

 down lanes and lakes and across belts of deadly still water 

 between floes of flat ice, with few and small hummocks. 

 And seals became plentiful. As far as the eye could reach, 



occasional black marks could be seen on the floe and little 

 black bullet-heads appeared in calm water at the floe-edge, 

 and some of them came and examined us from thirty or 

 forty yards as we passed, for an instant, and dashed under 

 water again, leaving a swirl like the rise of a ten-pound trout. 



Yes, I think that was the whole day's programme, ex- 

 cepting an alarm for bottle-nose whale. That came in the 

 middle of aften-mad, seven or eight P.M., and we hastily 

 loaded our two bow harpoon-guns, and got all ready and waited 

 and watched, but the bottle-nose did not appear again. In 

 several books on whales I see very misleading drawings of the 

 bottle-nose whale, Hyperoodon diodon. This one is taken 

 from notes of these whales in various seas, alive and dead. 



We were about to lay ourselves down to rest when a shout 

 that a bear was in sight came from the mast-head, and all 

 of us became very much alive. 



It was on a floe a mile off, and the floe was peppered with 



