storm on the swaying ice-fields; or a man will
suddenly plump through a broken place in the
ice, and before he can attract the attention of
the eager hunters, will be carried away by the
current under the floe and lost for ever. Storms
will even occasionally destroy the vessel, but
these mishaps are rarer here than in Baffin's
Bay; and as another ship is usually at hand,
there is seldom any loss of life. Frost bites are
of daily occurrence, but are nothing compared
with the condensed frozen vapour of the sea
which pierces the face like a shower of
needles. The feeling after being subjected
to it for an hour or two is that of being shaved
by a ragged razor, hence the seaman terms it
"the barber." Again, he may be unlucky
enough to get frozen in with his ship, with
the seals in sight through the telescope from
the mast-head, too far off to be of any use
to him. So, Tantalus-like, he sees riches and
is unable to grasp them, while the lucky
Dutchman, who bears the reputation of being
the best sealer in the Greenland sea, is filling
his ship. But there is no help for it. So the
skipper goes down to take his meridian rum
and water—the sun being over the foreyard—
growling something about a certain personage
taking care of his own, and makes up his
mind to meet a cold reception from "his
owners," as he relates the tale of his ill-
luck. He has another competitor besides the
Dutchman: a grim old gentleman in a shaggy
white coat. The sailors call him " the
farmer;" but he is more widely known as
the Polar bear. Seals form the greater
portion of the polar bear's food, though he will
often clear an islet of eider ducks' eggs in the
course of a few hours. Every ice hummock
sends forth its bear, and if you are to credit
the Esquimaux report, the she bear makes for
seals, with her cub hanging about her neck.
Hunters will tell you, among other traditions
of the sealing craft, how Jim Bilboe or
Sandy McWhuddin, a messmate, was flensing a
seal in the spring of '47, and felt a rough
hand laid on his shoulder, and cried out—
"What the Something do you want? None of
your skylarking!" but getting no response,
looked up, and was astonished to find a huge
white bear with its paw on his shoulder,
inquiring, in its own way, why he trespassed on
his northern domains? Then, again, you will be
told how Jan van der Drunk, "skipper of a
Dutchman," was walking along the ice one
afternoon, thinking of the Zuyder Zee, when he
became suddenly conscious of being steadily
accompanied, cheek by jowl, by a bear. As
Captain Jan halted so did Bruin, and as the
skipper walked so did the bear, until Jan's
men relieved him by a sortie from the ship.

The seal itself is generally harmless enough;
but it will sometimes endanger the sealer's
peace of mind and "continuity of tissue."
The bladder-nose will boldly meet his opponent,
and even the quiet sober saddle-back,
in the fury of maternal affection, will sometimes,
when the sealer is flaying its pup, stretch
her head out of the water and seize him by
the calf of the leg, inflicting with its powerful
tusks very severe wounds.

A score of such yarns, you will hear while the
good ship, Spoutin' Whale, is filling up with
seals in the "Greenland Sea of the Dutch,"
as Mr. Norrie's old chart, which hangs up in
the cabin, styles it. This is about the end of
April, and now the great fields of ice are broken
into fragments, and the carcases of the seals
covering it are either left to the polar bear or
sunk to the bottom of the sea, where they must
now, with those of whales, form such a bed,
that I would like to hear the theory which
geologists (say a couple of million years or so
hence) will form regarding this "deposit,"
when the bed of the Spitzbergen sea forms
fields of yellow grain, and England perhaps
is a tropical forest!

The sealers care nothing for the flesh,
though the livers are sometimes eaten. The
Esquimaux, however, look upon the flesh in
quite a different light, and, indeed, when
cooked it is far from contemptible as the pièce
de resistance of an Arctic dinner, and very
much superior to a burgomaster gull. The
sealer, however, thinks it is unwholesome, for
now and then he sees the young affected by a
disease not unlike scrofula: an inflammation of
the glands of the neck: and curiously enough
this goitre-like disease induces dwarfishness in
the seals, as it does in the Cretins of the Alps
and elsewhere. Some of the sealers, if they
intend to pursue the Spitzbergen whaling in
the ensuing summer, follow the flocks of seals,
which have now taken to the water, northward,
and in the month of May often fall in
with considerable numbers. This is called the
"old sealing," but as the seals are apt to sink
when shot late in the year, though early in
the spring they are so fat as to float, this kind
of business is not popular with the sealers, and
most of them return home, to deposit their
cargo, and to refit for the "Straits fishing" in
Davis Strait and Baffin's Bay. As they steam
gaily southward, the men get up the seals and
pare the layer of blubber off the skins. If the
voyage is likely to be a long or a warm one, a
little salt is sometimes thrown over the skins,
but generally the weather is cold enough for
their preservation in perfectly good condition
until they are unshipped. The old skipper is in
high trim at his success, and over his evening
grog tells all sorts of traditions of the trade. For
instance, he relates how in the year '11, when he
was 'prentice on board the Nancy Dawson,
a square old bluff-bowed snuff-box of a Hull
whaler, we were at war with France, and
French cruisers liked nothing better than to
take a run up in the North Sea and cut out an
old whaler. There wasn't much in her, no
doubt, but still she was a prize, and if nothing
better she made a good blaze when burnt. They
didn't dare, however, to venture in among the
ice, as their vessels were not fortified for such
work, and accordingly, when one summer day
the Nancy Dawson had just unhooked from the
floe, and a French man-o'-war bore down upon
her, she ran immediately in among the ice,