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

full of brash ice and small growlers but we effected an easy landing on shelving iceworn
rocks which sloped off quickly to deep water and a clean sandy bottom. We
secured the dory and spent about half an hour reconnoitering this stretch of coast.
About 20 yards from our landing was a 9 ft seal with coat in very good postmoult
condition. It was dark-grey, almost black, dorsally and the flanks and belly
were flecked with silver grey. Its head was disproportionately small and the neck
similarly slender, mounted on rather powerful shoulders behind which the barrellike
body tailed off. The tail itself was quite long for a seal. The vibrissae (whiskers)
were very long and its teeth looked rather vicious. Derek went up to it and stroked
its muzzle! It made no effort to attack him but backed away. Derek photographed it
and then as I wished to see it swimming we prodded it with an ice axe to encourage
it to take to the water. It wasn't happy with this and vocalised and snapped its jaws.
We persuaded it into the water and it swam lithely away thrashing its hind-flippers.
It was a handsome beast and its movements on land were more graceful and sinuous
than the elephant seals we were used to. Making its way across the bay it hauled out
on an islet where, with the aid of binoculars, I could see three other similar seals. It
was the first of this kind we had seen and I thought at first it must be a leopard seal,
but later realized it was actually a Weddell. We cut up the hillside after counting the
elephants in sight mostly at the head of the bay on a boulder beach - 32, all small
ones. There were penguin tracks in the snow and some nesting areas with the red
excreta characteristic of the Adélie penguin rookeries.
A short vertical cliff along the north side of the bay had a columnar structure. At
its foot was a flat area of rocks, iceworn and tidewashed, which extended in a belt of
about 10 yards across before shelving steeply into the sand. We had to go to the head
of the bay in order to get around these cliffs which although only ten feet high in
places were heavily iced from sea spray. The entire hillside was covered with
squarish blocks, which may have been weathered basalt - it looked igneous. We
meant to return later to collect specimens and take angles from the cairn, but were
unable to do so.
On the ridge I came across the cairn marked on the chart as ∆ 270 ft. This position
offered a superb view of the ice cliffs of Iceberg Bay, which is very aptly named. It
also showed me that the next bay was probably the best place for us to place a depot.
A scramble some 200 ft up the ridge (which we decided to call Cairn Ridge) enabled
us to see that there was a good gravelly beach in the next bay. From there it should
be easy to get up behind the head of the bay and so on to the ice cap; or we could
turn northwards along the coast to the large Sunshine Glacier entering Iceberg Bay.
Another alternative was to go West across a low col to Marshall Bay. Returning to the
boat we rowed along the precipitous rocky coast to this cove. From the sea it looked
quite inaccessible due to a heavy concentration of brash ice - some large growlers and
one bergy bit which cracked and overturned when we were quite close to it. - but we
knew from our earlier inspection that we could beach the dory there. The beach
shelved gradually and then steepened up to high tide mark after which it eased off.
We had to haul the boat up to this line as the tide coming in would float off some
large bits of brash and these might damage the boat or carry it away! On the beach
were 19 elephants and a dozen gentoo penguins.
Derek built a cairn 20 ft above sea level and fixed its position by compass
bearings, while Ralph and I established a stores depot near it. After lunch we left for
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