Polar bears

Polar bears are more than a feature of the Arctic setting in the novel: they are living animals drawn into the whalers’ economy, subjected to human management, and capable of unsettling it. Their appearances connect the pursuit of profit and the routines of shipboard life with a wilderness that does not conform to the crew’s expectations. A captured cub first makes that tension intimate; the later adult bear confronts Patrick Sumner with a different measure of human vulnerability.

Arctic Animals and the Whaling Voyage

The expedition travels north through a changing landscape of fog, open water, and sea ice. The crew prepares to hunt seals, and the commercial arithmetic is explicit: Arthur Brownlee counts the skins and estimates their prospective oil yield and market value. Against this organized extraction, the novel presents the Arctic animals as more than interchangeable resources. The whalers’ work depends on finding and killing them, but the animals’ movements and behavior also shape what the crew can do and what dangers it must face.

A polar bear cub is kept aboard the Volunteer in a cask fitted with a metal grille. Patrick Sumner feeds it kitchen scraps and water, lets it move across the deck on a rope, and cleans its enclosure. The routine becomes familiar enough to the crew that the cub’s presence is part of daily shipboard life. The men also encourage it and the ship’s Airedale, Katie, to approach one another, treating their wary interaction as entertainment. The episode shows how quickly a wild animal can be made to serve the crew’s needs: the bear is confined, fed, and displayed, even as its responses remain its own.

Captivity, Familiarity, and Release

As the Volunteer enters Lancaster Sound, the bear’s daily routine has become a public spectacle. Sumner feeds it, leads it from its cask on a rope, and cleans the enclosure; the crew watches the bear and Katie, the ship’s Airedale, repeatedly approach and retreat from one another. The men encourage the encounter, but their amusement cannot make the animals’ different temperaments predictable. When the bear injures Katie, a blacksmith kills the dog, while Sumner restrains the bear and refuses the suggestion that it should be killed too. The episode turns the crew’s entertainment into a consequence of keeping a wild animal confined among people and domestic animals.

Later, at the winter camp, Sumner and Otto take the bear away from the camp and open its cask. It has grown considerably during its time in captivity, and Sumner recognizes that his regular feeding has left it poorly prepared to hunt for itself. Otto points out that its skin could fetch a price in Hull, but the immediate choice is whether to shoot it or release it. Sumner lets it out onto the ice. The decision exposes the cost of the apparent care that made the bear dependent: returning it to the wild does not restore the independence it had before capture.

The Wild Bear and Sumner’s Survival

At the winter camp, a wild polar bear appears while Sumner is weakened by hunger and the cold. Unlike the cub he once tended aboard the Volunteer, this animal is not contained or dependent on human care: it moves across the shore and ice on its own terms. Sumner watches it approach two dead men, then follows after wounding it with a rifle. The pursuit carries him away from camp and into worsening weather, where tracks and signs of blood are his only guide.

When the bear appears again through the blowing snow, Sumner shoots and kills it. He uses the carcass to recover warmth and collapses. The encounter reverses the earlier pattern of human control: the animal is no longer cargo or spectacle but the immediate condition of Sumner’s survival, and his effort to live depends on the body of the creature he has hunted.

Two hunters find Sumner barely alive beside the bear. They take the bear’s meat and hide for their own use, but debate whether to leave Sumner or bring him back; deciding that he deserves another chance, they carry him to their camp. There, the community gives him water and warmed seal blood, while competing rumors cast him as either a spirit guide or an evil presence. The bear’s death thus leads not simply to Sumner’s rescue but to his entry into a society that interprets his survival through its own beliefs.

Scavengers and the Whaling Economy

The hunt’s waste also becomes part of the Arctic animals’ world. After Henry Drax skins seals on the ice, he leaves the bloodied remains behind, where gulls or bear cubs may feed on them. Brownlee, by contrast, counts the skins as cargo: four hundred, he estimates, could yield nine tons of oil, with each ton worth about forty pounds if the market holds. The juxtaposition places the bears within the consequences of the expedition’s commercial work without making them part of its calculations: they encounter what the hunt leaves behind, while the crew measures the same animals and landscape in loads, yield, and price.