AUGUST 13 TO JANUARY i, i8g6 661 



night so that the mothers could come into them from the ice 

 whenever they wanted to. 



In respect to temper, there was a great difference between 

 the generation of dogs we had originally taken on board and 

 those we now had. While the former were great fighters, per- 

 petually at feud with each other, and often to the death, the lat- 

 ter were exceedingly quiet and well-behaved, although wild and 

 fierce enough when it came to chasing a bear. Now and then 

 there would be a little squabble among them, but this was rare. 

 "Axel" was the worst of them. Shortly before Christmas he 

 all of a sudden made a fierce attack upon the unoffending 

 " Kobben," against whom he bore a grudge. But he got the 

 rope's-end for supper several times, and that improved his man- 

 ners amazingly. 



During the first half of September the weather was very un- 

 settled, with prevailing westerly and southwesterly winds, a good 

 deal of rain and snow, especially rain, and frequent disturbance 

 in the ice. The frost at night, which sometimes reached 10° or 

 1 1°, soon made the new ice strong enough to bear a man, ex- 

 cept just at the stern of the ship, where all the slops were thrown 

 out. Here the ice was much broken up, and formed a thick 

 slush, the surface of which was frozen over, but so thinly that it 

 would not bear much weight. Thus it happened one day that three 

 men got a ducking, one after another, at the same treacherous 

 spot. The first was Pettersen. He had to go round the stern 

 to look to the log-line which hung from the ship's side to port; 

 but before he got so far, down he went through the ice. Short- 

 ly after the same thing happened to Nordahl, and half an hour 

 later it was Bentzen's turn to plump in. He plunged right up 

 to his neck, but at once bobbed up again like a cork, and 

 scrambled gallantly up on to the edge of the ice without a mo- 

 ment's delay. The observation of the log-line had to be post- 

 poned, while a grand changing and drying of clothes took place 

 on board. 



On September 15th the ice slackened so much that there was 

 quite a little sea between us and the great hummock. The fol- 

 lowing day the ice was still so much disturbed that we had to 



