FROM EDINBURGH TO THE ANTARCTIC 
207 
A few penguins are swimming round us. Now and 
then they put their heads above water and quangk — a 
sudden, melancholy, strange call, sounding sad and lonely 
in the mist. 
This morning we saw a seal alongside, apparently 
sleeping, I bolted for my rifle and managed to put a 
bullet in its head. We drifted down on it ; but we had 
nothing ready to hook into it ; a boat-hook would not 
hold, and a running bowline we got round it slipped over 
its after end, just as we had hauled it up to the rail. 
Fortunately it was shot before it had time to contract its 
muscles, so it floated. 1 
It would have been an unlucky thing to lose the first 
blood of the cruise, so the starboard quarter-boat was 
lowered and after some hunting the seal was picked up. 
1 I hold that the contraction of the muscle — the panniculus carnosus — has 
more to do with a seal's sinking than the state of its lungs when it is shot. 
