heir situation, and, being
tolerably tame, were allowed occasionally to go at large about the
deck. While the ship was moored to a floe, a few days after they were
taken, one of them, having a rope fastened round his neck, was thrown
overboard. It immediately swam to the ice, got upon it, and attempted
to escape. Finding itself, however, detained by the rope, it endeavored
to disengage itself in the following ingenious way: Near the edge of
the floe was a crack in the ice, of considerable length, but only
eighteen inches or two feet wide, and three or four feet deep. To this
spot the bear turned, and when, on crossing the chasm, the bight of the
rope fell into it, he placed himself across the opening; then,
suspending himself by his hind feet, with a leg on each side, he
dropped his head and most part of his body into the chasm, and, with a
foot applied to each side of the neck, attempted, for some minutes, to
push the rope over his head. Finding this scheme ineffectual, he
removed to the main ice, and, running with great impetuosity from the
ship, gave a remarkable pull on the rope; then, going backwards a few
steps, he repeated the jerk. At length, after repeated attempts to
escape this way, every failure of which he announced by a significant
growl, he yielded himself to hard necessity, and lay down on the ice in
angry and sullen silence.

Like the brown and black bear, polar bears are animals capable of great
fierceness. Brentz, in his voyage in search of the north-east passage
to China, had horrid proofs of their ferocity in the Island of Nova
Zembla, where they attacked his seamen, seizing them in their mouth,
carrying them off with the utmost ease, and devouring them even in
sight of their comrades.

About twenty years ago, the crew of a boat belonging to a ship in the
whale fishery, shot at a bear some little distance off, and wounded
him. The animal immediately set up a dreadful howl, and scampered along
the ice towards the boat. Before he reached it, he had received a
second wound. This increased his fury, and he presently plunged into
the water, and swam to the boat; and, in his attempt to board it, he
placed one of his fore paws upon the gunwale, and would have gained his
point, had not one of the sailors seized a hatchet and cut it off. Even
this had not the effect of damping his courage; for he followed the
boat till it reached the ship, from whence several shots were fired at
him, which hit, but did not