WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 293 



water for hours at a time, it would account for the way 

 they sometimes appear all at once in numbers and feed 

 voraciously, and then vanish for hours. 



I have made a picture of a pack of rather small killers 

 attacking a finner whale, an incident I observed in the 

 southern ice from the distance of two or three yards. They 

 pursued the large whale like a pack of black and white 

 hounds, but neither whale nor hounds made a sound that I 

 could hear. 



Dr Frangius, however, in his " Treatise of Animals," says 

 that when an orca pursues " a whale " the latter makes a 

 terrible bellowing, like a bull when bitten by a dog. I 

 wonder what kind of whale he refers to, for I have seen a 

 number of finner whales being attacked by orcas and have 

 not heard any bellowing, except the narwhal, whose groan 

 is certainly like a subdued bellow of a cow. 



Yesterday we had wind, and the sky that portended wind 

 if any sky does. When you have this sky it is almost safe 

 to prophesy wind say three days of it this is our second 

 day. 



We make one mile an hour forward. We are a hundred 

 miles off Norway and hoped to be in soundings fishing cod 

 at two A.M. to-morrow on the coast. But here we are 

 plugging almost at the same hole, our poor wee ship throb- 

 bing with the strain. We carried away our mainsail yester- 

 day a thing to make a yachtsman weep ; still, after all, it was 

 a sail, and even one sail on a steamer gives dignity. Don 

 Luis Herrero in the lee alley-way just cleared the halyard 

 block. Had he not been very quick in his movements, as 

 many Spaniards are, he would have been a dead man. Star- 

 board bear broke half out ; that is nothing new. William 

 has learned the mandolin, he has a piece of wood in his cage, 

 one side of which is crossed horizontally with stout wire, and 

 with the wood, holding it in his teeth, he scrapes the wires up 

 and down and plays three notes for ever and for ever. I 

 do hope that, in whatever zoo he may become a resident, 

 he may be provided with a similar instrument with which to 

 fill his life. He, as far as I can see, now makes no effort to 

 escape like his big relative the Starboard bear, who is more 



