The Salt Lake herald. [volume] (Salt Lake City [Utah]) 1870-1909, 1894-10-07

| covered with transparent varnish and
! twenty-three patents
There is a bookcase filled with solid
historical volumes for the most part.
! The most remarkable feature of the>
room is a series of water-color draw
! ings done by Conan Doyle's father The
Doyle family has always been fam
lily of artists. and the celebrated cover
/ of Punch is, as everybody knows, the
work of Richard Doyle. The drawings
by Mr.. Doyle's father are most weird
and imaginative, being in art some
thing like Edgar Allan Poe's stories are
in fiction.
There are harpoons on the wall, for
Doyle has been whale fisher in his
time, and has the skull of a polar bear
and the stuffed body of an Iceland fall
con to show that his aim was accurate
There are but two other Iceland fall
cons in England. The novelist came
nearer to the North Pole than New
York is to Chicago.
HIS ARCTIC EXPERIENCES.
No part of this authors varied life
was richer in experiences to him than
the months he spent aboard a Peter
head whaler. He roughed it along with
the sturdy Scotch crew, but his recep-
tive artists nature received a thousand
sharp impressions of which his COM
paniOns remained ignorant. No one
has described the sightings and hunt of
a whale so wildly as DR.. Doyle, who
says:
1T is not that the present generation
is less persistent and skillful than it's
predecessors, nor is it that the Green
land whale is in danger OF becoming
extinct; but the true reason appears to
|. be that nature, while depriving this I'M
wieldy mass of blubber of any weap-
ons. has given it in compensation a
highly intelligent brain. That the
; whale entirely understands the mech
anlsm of his own capture is beyond dis
pute. To swim backward and forward
beneath foe, in the hope of cutting
the rope against the sharp edge of the
ice, is a common device of the creature
after being struck BY degrees. how
ever, it has realized the fact that there
are limits to the powers of its adver-
saries, and that by keeping far in
among the icefields it may shake off the
most intrepid of pursuers Gradually
the creature has deserted the open sea
ana pored deeper and deeper among
the Ice barriers, until now, at last. it
really appears to have reached mac
cesslble feeding grounds; and it is sell
dom, i2deed, that the watcher in the
crows nest sees the plume of spray and
the black tail in the air which set his
heart a-thumping.
But If a man have the good for
abbveihll, if he, be, as I have been. in
The harpconing and the lancing boat
he has lasts of sport which it would
be III to match. To play salmon is a
royal game, but when your fish weighs
more than suburban villa, and
is worth a clear two thousand pounds.
when, too your line is thumbs thick
ness of manila rope with fifty strands
every strand tested for thirty-six
pounds, it dwarfs all other experiences
And the lancing, too, when the creature
is spent, and your boat pulls in to give
II the coup de grace with, cold steel
that is also excitingi A hundred tons
OF despair are churning thei waters. I'D
into red FOAM; two great black fins
are rising and falling like the sails of
windmill, casting the boat into a
shadows as they droop over DIT, but. still
the harpooner clings to the head
where. no harm can come and, with
the wooden butt of a twelve-foot lance
against his stomach. he presses it
home until the dong struggle is finish
, ed, and the black back rolls over to ex-
. pose the livid, whitish surface beneath.
J Yet amid all the excitement-ana; NO
one who has not held t.n oar in such a
scene can tell how exciting it is-one's
: sympathies lie with the poor hunted
; creature The whale has a small eve.
little larger than that of a bullock:
but / cannot easily forget the mute
expostulation which I read in one as
) 1T is dimmed over in death within
hands, touch of me. What could it
guess, poor creature, of the laws of
supply and demand; or how could it
imagine. that when nature placed an
elastic filter inside of its mouth. and
when man discovered that the plates
of which it was composed were the
most pliable and yet durable things in
creation its death warrant was. sign
ed?"
TO THE FAR SOUTH.
/ Conan Doyle is not man who goes
to gextre,nes, but it seems that he did
: in the matter of his yoyaging. He