Page:A Voyage of Discovery and Research in the Southern and Antarctic Regions Vol 2.djvu/284

250 blanket bags, drew a sail over us; and, never too tired for our pipe and glass of grog, my companion and I yarned for an hour; when the nature of our conversation led to the following remarks.

"Like all similar sports, requiring little superiority of intellect or cunning, and involving much bloodshed, we agreed in pronouncing this to be a barbarous exercise, which, however exciting and manly in its pursuit, should only be practised as a duty, and not indulged in for amusement only. The death by violent means of any creature innocuous to man should excite sympathy in the well-regulated mind, proportionably to the defencelessness of the sufferer: whilst ths sight of one of the larger animals, helplessly weltering in its own blood, is not only painful but revolting. The temporary excitement, or the opportunity of rejoicing in one's own power or prowess, which leads the sportsman in the field to thirst for the slaughter of the deer at home, or of the cattle in the Falklands, but which so deserts him elsewhere that he shuns the sight of the shambles, cannot be wholesome: for it renders him callous to the cry of pain, though inflicted by himself, and it has a purely selfish object. We had turned our heads away when the cow was slaughtered; and walked off whilst the butcher quartered it, and so we remembered having left, in Kerguelen's Land, the first sea-bears we killed, till cold, before we could with untroubled minds assist in their transportation: so, too, it was not without remorse that the first sea-leopard was lanced on the ice; whose bravery before death, and mild supplicating eye when writhing under the spear, seemed to ask if passive courage deserved such a fate, if it were meet that any other motive than stern necessity should tempt a generous foe to witness a gallant endurance of wrongs, which the sufferer can neither avert nor requite. We found that being habituated to these sights blunted our feelings of sympathy: a deterioration of mind which, in educated men, may lead to no mischief,