Part I: Seals teeth and whales ears - Scott Polar Research Institute ...

anaesthetic - Pentathol - required about 10 cc to take effect. After much
tinkering a rubber-tubing feed was fixed up so that the syringes could be
interchanged. It was difficult to get Jock under with this quite inadequate
equipment and Derek, who was also assisting, fainted while I was filling a
syringe from a phial he held. Jock burst out singing and quoting Rabbie Burns
and the operation was completed. He told us later that he felt no pain - but
during the treatment his body appeared to be writhing in agony. I viewed it all
quite objectively; who knows but I might have made a good doctor!
More Wildlife
I had another day off and spent most of it writing letters. Large birds were
seen at intervals during the day: brown except for white lower breast and
abdomen; wings and flight petrel-like. It conformed to Alexander's description
of Schlegel's petrel. There were several tuna and a turmoil of small fish at
lunchtime. At 3.30 pm we saw four young sperm whales off the starboard bow;
they were blunt nosed with a single puffy spout. I borrowed Dr Fuch's
microscope and looked at the plankton, which I had collected the previous day -
desmids I think but they had rather disintegrated overnight. There were also
some small amphipods and a species of cyclopoid copepod. Conditions were
very primitive - the microscope on top of an oil drum, spray and wind, and
people having their hair cut just behind me. Every now and then I would have
to move the whole apparatus when someone wanted to get into the after hatch.
How good it would have been to have a square yard of bench in a
laboratory with decent equipment; a petrological microscope was not ideal.
Dave Golton (meteorologist) showed me a humming-bird hawkmoth that he
had captured during the night and put in a matchbox. Unfortunately Bill
opened the box and it flew off before I really had time to observe it properly.
Later we found a large red dragonfly in the wardroom. Pat Toynbee gave an
amusing talk entitled ‘Two years with the Antarctic whaling fleet’; he had
served in the Antarctic on an ‘armed merchant raider’ the Empress of Bermuda
during the war. Another wonderful sunset came with a complete spectrum
above the horizon: brilliant orange cirrus against a blue sky, and the sea at one
time like red ink, with bright mauve, green, yellow and blue reflected from the
sky. The surface looked almost fluorescent.
On the morning of 15 January it was very rough but I sat at the stern and
read, and drew Schlegel's petrels. We saw our first albatross - an immature
‘wanderer’, which was later joined by two others. They followed the ship
throughout the day. There were dozens of Schlegel's petrels and some of them
came in very close, passing only 8 or 9 feet above our heads. Another smaller
bird appeared which I identified as a dusky shearwater.
The Captain reported a minke whale in the afternoon, brown from the film
of diatoms on its skin. At 6 o’clock, while on watch, I saw seven or eight whales
blowing about a mile or so dead ahead and as we came up to them their backs
and dorsal fins were visible when they came up to blow. One of them sounded
only 20 yards from our starboard beam, throwing up its massive black tail
flukes and plunging almost vertically downwards. Another small sperm whale
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