MAMMALIA, 31 
certain sort of stone, a species of diamond. During this search, two of the 
seamen lay down to sleep by one another, anda White Bear, very lean, approach- 
ing softly, seized one of them by the nape of the neck. The poor man, not 
knowing what it was, cried out, ‘Who has seized me thus behind?’ on which his 
companion, raising his head, said, ‘ Holloa, mate, it is a Bear,’ and immediately 
ran away. The Bear having dreadfully mangled the unfortunate man’s head, 
sucked the blood. The rest of the persons who were on shore, to the number 
of twenty, immediately ran with their matchlocks and pikes, and found the Bear 
devouring the body, which, on seeing them, ran upon them, and carrying another 
man away, tore him to pieces. This second misadventure so terrified them, that 
they all fled. They advanced again, however, with a reinforcement, and the two 
pilots having fired three times without hitting the animal, the purser approached a 
little nearer, and shot the Bear in the head, close by the eye. This did not cause 
him to quit his prey, for, holding the body, which he was devouring always by the 
neck, he carried it away as yet quite entire. Nevertheless, they then perceived 
that he began himself to totter, and the purser and a Scotchman going towards 
him, they gave him several sabre wounds, and cut him to pieces, without his 
abandoning his prey *.” 
In Barentz’s third voyage, a story is told of two Bears coming to the carcass of a 
third one that had been shot, when one of them, taking it by the throat, carried it to 
a considerable distance, over the most rugged ice, where they both began to eat it. 
They were scared from their repast by the report of a musket, and a party of 
seamen going to the place, found that, in the little time they were about it, they 
had already devoured half the carcase, which was of such a size that four men had 
great difficulty in lifting the remainder{. In a manuscript account of Hudson’s 
Bay, written about the year 1786, by Mr. Andrew Graham, one of Pennant’s 
ablest correspondents, and preserved at the Hudson’s Bay House, an anecdote of a 
different description occurs. “One of the Company’s servants who was tenting 
abroad to procure rabbits (Lepus Americanus), having occasion to come to the 
factory for a few necessaries, on his return to the tent passed through a narrow 
thicket of willows, and found himself close toa White Bear lying asleep. As he 
had nothing wherewith to defend himself, he took the bag off his shoulder and held 
it before his breast, between the Bear and him. ‘The animal arose on seeing the 
man, stretched himself and rubbed his nose, and having satisfied his curiosity by 
smelling at the bag, which contained a loaf of bread and a rundlet of strong beer, 
* CHURCHILL’s Coll. of Voy., vol.i. p. 88. + Ibid., vol. i, p. 115. 
