In hunting seals the Polar Bear enters the water at some distance from where his prey is basking on the ice and swims with great rapidity toward it, keeping well under water and raising the tip of his nose to the surface at intervals for breath. At last it rises beneath and in front of the seal and strikes it where it lies, or if it escapes into the water, captures it with ease, for he is a very rapid and expert diver. One has been known to dive from a block of ice and capture a passing salmon as deftly as a kingfisher catches a minnow. In Greenland the Polar Bear is known to swim from island to island along the shore, eating the eggs and young of the innumerable birds which nest there. Jacques Cartier, the French navigator, in the narrative of his voyage to Newfoundland in 1534 gives a wonderful account of the Polar Bear’s fondness for birds and eggs and the efforts which he will make to procure them. An “Island of Birds” was discovered off the coast of Newfoundland, “and albeit the sayd island be fourteen leagues from the maine-land, notwithstanding beares come swimming thither to eat of the sayd birds, and our men found one there as great as any cow, and as white as any swan, who in their presence leapt into the sea, and upon Whitsun Munday (following our voyage to the land) we met her by the way, swimming toward land as swiftly as we could saile. So soon as we saw her we pursued her with our boats, and by maine strength tooke her, whose flesh was as good to be eaten as the flesh of a calf of two yeares old.” Captain Sabine reports having seen a Polar Bear swimming strongly forty miles from land and with no ice in sight upon which to rest, so the statement of Cartier is perhaps true. Very few cows weigh fifteen hundred pounds, but this is the recorded weight of Polar Bears, “as great as any cow,” killed by whaling crews in the arctic seas.