III.] 
THE POLAR BEAR. 
143 
a sailor was once carried off from a whaler caught in the ice 
in Davis’ Straits, and in 1820, among the drift-ice in the 
sea between Greenland and Spitzbergen, the same fate was 
like to befall one of the crew of a Hull whaler; but he succeeded 
in effecting his escape by taking to flight, and throwing to the 
bear, first his only weapon of defence, a lance, and then his 
articles of clothing, one after the otherd On the 6th of March 
1870, Dr. Boergen was attacked by a bear, and dragged a 
considerable distance.^ It is remarkable that the bear did not 
this time either kill his prey, but that he had time to cry out, 
A bear is dragging me away ; ” and that, after the bear had 
dragged him several hundred yards and he had got free, he 
could, though very badly scalped, himself make his way back to 
the vessel. The scalping had been done by the bear attempting 
to crush the skull in its mouth, as it is accustomed to do to the 
seals it catches. Scoresby considers it dangerous to hunt the 
Polar bear in deep snow. The well-known Dane, C. Petersen, 
guide to McClintock, Kane and others, on the other hand, 
considered it as little dangerous to attack a bear as to slaughter 
a sheep. The Siberian traveller, Hedenstrom, says that a man 
may venture to do so with a knife tied to a walking-stick, and 
the Norwegian hunters, or at least the Norwegian-Finnish 
harpooners, express themselves in much the same way regarding 
“ this noble and dangerous ” sport. 
The bear’s principal food consists of the seal and walrus. 
It is said that with a single stroke of his powerful paw he can 
cast a walrus up on the ice. On the other hand he seldom 
succeeds in catching the reindeer, because it is fleeter than the 
bear. I have, however, in North East Land, on two occasions, 
seen blood and hair of reindeer which had been caught by bears. 
There is not the least doubt that, along with flesh, the bear also 
^ W. Scoresby’s des Jungern, Tagehuch einer Reise auf dem Wallfischfang. 
Aus dem engl. iiehers. Hamburg, 1825, p. 127. 
^ Die zvmte deuUche Nordpolarfahrt^ Vol. I. p. 465. 
