Polar bear hunt ends with cub captured

The polar bear hunt aboard the Volunteer turns a mother and cub into prospective commodities, then exposes the human cost of pursuing them. The men set out intending to capture the cub alive for sale and take the mother’s skin; when the hunt goes wrong, Drax’s decisive intervention cannot prevent a crewman’s death.

Commercial Aim and First Shot

Drax, Cavendish, and two other men drag a whaleboat across a broad, uneven floe toward a polar bear at the edge of open water. Through a spyglass, Cavendish spots the cub following its mother. Drax values the cub at twenty pounds alive and proposes that they skin the mother, making the hunt a calculation of saleable animal and expected return. As they approach, Cavendish lines up a shot, but the bullet strikes the bear in the rump rather than the heart. The wounded animal begins circling, and the expedition’s commercial plan gives way to an immediate struggle to manage the danger they have created.

Escalation and Loss

As the boat circles, the bear rises beside its stern and attacks. Cavendish fires again, striking it in the chest, but the blow does not stop it from reaching the boat and throwing the crew into confusion. Drax takes an eight-inch boat spade and kills the bear with repeated blows. The act ends the immediate threat, but one of the oarsmen has suffered a grave injury in the attack.

Cavendish and the others pull the injured man back aboard and bind his wound with a length of whale line. Drax, however, remains focused on the cub’s sale value. He secures it with a rope, and the men tow it and the dead bear back toward the Volunteer. The oarsman dies before they reach the ship, turning a hunt undertaken for profit into a fatal loss for the crew.

Capture and Disposition

Back aboard the Volunteer, the dead bear is hoisted clear of the water while the cub, separated from its mother, struggles against its rope collar. Drax and Cavendish have the cub placed in an empty blubber cask, which the crew haul onto deck. Brownlee orders the mother’s body lowered; once the cub is released, it goes to the corpse and settles beside it. The brief reunion interrupts the hunt’s commercial logic without undoing it: Drax continues to emphasize the cub’s estimated value of twenty pounds and his contact at a zoo.

Brownlee directs that a grille be made to keep the cub confined in the cask, acknowledging that it will probably die before the ship reaches home. If it survives, he says, its sale money will go to the dead oarsman’s family. Drax appears ready to object but accepts the decision. The arrangement makes the cub’s uncertain survival part of the compensation for the fatal expedition, while preserving its status as a possible source of income. After the oarsman’s body is sewn into sailcloth and put overboard, Cavendish skins the bear as the confined cub watches. The hunt thus concludes with the mother converted into a pelt, the cub held for possible sale, and the crewman’s death assigned a prospective monetary remedy.

Commercial Context and Narrative Significance

The bear hunt belongs to a voyage already organized around turning animal bodies into marketable cargo. During the earlier sealing, Brownlee counts the skins and estimates that four hundred could yield nine tons of oil, with each ton worth about forty pounds; competing whaling ships are working the same ice. The bear presents a different calculation: its cub is valued alive for a prospective zoo sale, while the mother is intended for her skin. The distinction changes the proposed use of the animals, not the commercial measure applied to them.

That logic continues as the Volunteer proceeds toward the North Water in search of whales. After the first whale is killed, Brownlee estimates its oil and baleen at close to nine hundred pounds, while the crew’s work turns the carcass into stores for the ship. Against this larger pattern of capture, processing, and valuation, the bear hunt concentrates the voyage’s competing claims: a cub is treated as prospective merchandise, a hide as a product, and the dangers of extraction are borne by the crew. Brownlee’s promise to direct any money from the cub to the dead oarsman’s family offers compensation, but leaves the underlying conversion of animal life into value intact.