The Worst Journey in the World
Seals :)
The Weddell seal is black on top, and splashed with silver in other places. He measures up to 10 feet from nose to tail, eats fish, is corpulent and hulking. He sometimes carries four inches of blubber. On the ice he is one of the most sluggish of God's creatures, he sleeps continually, digests huge meals, and grunts, gurgles, pipes, trills and whistles in the most engaging way. In the sea he is transformed into one of the most elastic and lithe of beasts, catching his fish and swallowing them whole. As you stand over his blow-hole his head appears, and he snorts at you with surprise but no fear, opening and shutting his nostrils the while as he takes in a supply of fresh air. It is clear that they travel for many miles beneath the ice, and I expect they find their way from air-hole to air-hole by listening to the noise made by other seals. Some of the air-holes are exit and entrance holes as well, and I found at least one seal which appeared to have died owing to its opening freezing up. They may be heard at times grinding these holes open with their teeth (Ponting took some patient cinematographs showing the process of sawing the openings to these wells) and their teeth are naturally much worn by the time they become old. Wilson states that they are liable to kidney trouble: their skin is often irritable, which may be due to the drying salt from the sea; and I have seen one seal which was covered with a suppurating rash. Their spleens are sometimes enormously enlarged when they first come out of the sea on to the ice, which is interesting because no one seems to know much about spleens. Speculation was caused amongst us by the fact that some of these air-holes had as it were a trap-door above them. One day I was on the ice-foot at Cape Evans at a time when North Bay was frozen over with about an inch or more of ice. A seal suddenly poked his nose up through this ice to get air, and when he disappeared a slab which had been raised by his head fell back into this trap position. Clearly this was the origin of the door.
Weddell seals and the Hut Point life are inextricably mixed up in my recollections of October. Atkinson, Debenham, Dimitri and I went down to Hut Point on the 12th, with the two dog-teams. We were to run two depôts out on to the Barrier, and Debenham, whose leg prevented his further sledging, was to do geological work and a plane table survey. Those of us who had borne the brunt of the travelling of the two previous sledge seasons were sick of sledging. For my own part I confess I viewed the whole proceedings with distaste, and I have no doubt the others did too; but the job had to be done if possible, and there was no good in saying we were sick of it. From beginning to end of this year men not only laboured willingly, but put their hearts and souls into the work. To have to do another three months' journey seemed bad enough, and to leave our comfortable Winter Quarters three weeks before we started on that journey was an additional irritation. We ran down in surface drift: it was thick to the south, the wind bit our faces and hands; we could see nothing by the time we got in, and the snow was falling heavily. The stable was full of beastly snow, the hut was cold and cheerless, and there was no blubber for the stove. And if we had only taken the ship and gone home when the period for which we had joined was passed, we might have been in London for the last six months!
But then the snow stopped, the wind went down, and the mountain tops appeared in all their glorious beauty. We were in the middle of a perfect summer afternoon, with a warm sun beating on the rocks as we walked round to Pram Point. There were many seals here already, and it was clear that the place would form a jolly nursery this year, for there must have been a lot of movement on the Barrier and the sea-ice was seamed with pressure ridges up to twenty feet in height. The hollows were buckled until the sea water came up and formed frozen ponds which would thaw later into lovely baths. Sheltered from the wind the children could chase their ridiculous tails to their hearts' content: their mothers would lie and sleep, awakening every now and then to scratch themselves with their long finger-nails. Not quite yet, but they were not far away: Lappy, one of our dogs who always looked more like a spaniel than anything else, heard one under the ice and started to burrow down to him!
Nearly three weeks later I paid several more visits to this delightful place. It was thick with seals, big seals and little seals, hairy seals and woolly seals: every day added appreciably to the number of babies, and to the baaings and bleatings which made the place sound like a great sheepfold. In every case where I approached, the mothers opened their mouths and bellowed at me to keep away, but they did not come for me though I actually stroked one baby. Often when the mother bellowed the little one would also open his mouth, producing just the ghost of a bellow: not because he seemed afraid of us, but rather because he thought it was the right thing to do: as indeed it probably was. One old cow was marked with hoops all round her body, like an advertisement of Michelin tyres: only the hoops were but an inch apart from one another, and seemed to be formed by darker and longer bands of hair: probably something to do with the summer moult. Two cows, which scrambled out of the same hole one after the other, were fighting, the hinder one biting the other savagely as she made an ungainly entrance. The first was not in calf, the aggressor, however, was: this may have had something to do with it. They were both much cut about and bleeding.
A seal is never so pretty as when he is a baby. With his grey woolly coat, which he keeps for a fortnight, his comparatively long flippers and tail, and his big dark eyes, he looks very clean and pussy-like. I watched one running round and round after his tail, putting his flipper under his head as a pillow, and scratching himself, seemingly as happy as possible: yet it was pretty cold with some wind.
Little is known of the lighter side of a Weddell's life. It seems probable that their courtship is a ponderous affair. About October 26 Atkinson found an embryo of about a fortnight old, which is an interesting stage, and this was preserved with many others we found, but all of them were too old to be of any real value. I think there is a good deal of variation in the size of the calves at birth. There is certainly much difference between the care of individual mothers, some of which are most concerned when you approach, while others take little notice or lop away from you, leaving their calf to look after itself, or to find another mother. Sometimes they are none too careful not to roll or lie on their calves.
One afternoon I drove a bull seal towards a cow with a calf. The cow went for him bald-headed, with open mouth, bellowing and most disturbed. The bull defended himself as best he might but absolutely refused to take the offensive. The calf imitated his mother as best he could.
Meanwhile Atkinson and Dimitri took some mule-fodder and dog-biscuit to a point twelve miles south of Corner Camp. They started on October 14 with the two dog-teams and found a most terrible surface on the Barrier, the sledges sometimes sinking as far as the 'fore-and-afters'; the minimum temperatures the first two nights were -39° and -25°; strong blizzard at Corner Camp; a lie-up for a day and a half, before they could push on in wind and drift and lay the depôt. The dogs ran back from Corner Camp to Hut Point on October 19, a distance of thirty miles. Three miles from Corner Camp three dogs of Atkinson's team fell into a crevasse, one of them falling right down to the length of his harness. The rest of the team, however, pulled on, and dragged the three dogs out as they went. Atkinson lost his driving-stick, which was left standing in the snow and served to mark a place to be avoided. Altogether a rather lucky escape: two men out alone with two dog-teams are somewhat helpless in case of emergency.