In these filthy, reeking holds, enduring all discomforts for the sake of perhaps a hundred dollars payable weeks hence, the men somehow recovered from their ailments and throve and grew fat on pork and seal meat, fried with onions. Whenever the rats were especially noisy, the wise ones said it meant a gale: but sometimes the rats and the wise men were wrong. It was no place for a man with a weak stomach, that gallant little sealing-steamer! On Sunday the men religiously refused to go out on the ice, though the seals tantalizingly frolicked all about them. The seals seemed to know how the pious Newfoundlander observes the Lord's Day. The animals stared at the ship and the ship stared back at them. Then in great glee the seals took to their perpetual water-sports, in which they are as adept as the penguins of the Antarctic. "I have marveled greatly," Grenfell says, "how it is possible for any hot-blooded creature to enjoy so immensely this terribly cold water as do these old seals. They paddle about, throw themselves on their backs, float and puff out their breasts, flapping their flippers like paws over their chests." While they lay off Fogo Island, watching the seals, the great pans of ice, rising and falling with the heaving of the sea, beat on the stout sides of the _Neptune_ as on a drum-head. Sometimes to avoid an awful drubbing the _Neptune_ would steam a little ahead, very much as a swimmer dives into a breaker to cleave it before it combs over and carries him off his feet. Grenfell himself, loving a bout with "the bright eyes of danger," left the ship and went out on the ice and tried to climb one of the bergs, stranded in the midst of the ice-pack. It was like a living thing striving to fight its way out--something like a polar bear surrounded by "husky" dogs worrying him and trying to pull him down. As a sky-scraper gives to the wind, the berg was rocked to and fro--eight feet or so with every wave that struck it. It fell on the pans like a great trip-hammer, backed away and came on again, the ice groaning as though it were a living creature in mortal agony. As pieces fell off into the sea the waves leapt up, the way wolves might leap about a running caribou. In such a battle of the ice with the ice, a man knows what a pigmy he is, measured against the mightiest natural forces. The _Neptune_ escaped a ramming--but her neighbor, the _Wolf_, was not so lucky. The _Wolf_ had rounded Fogo Island in an offshore wind that treacherously offered her a clear channel close to the land. As soon as she got round, the north wind, as though a demon impelled it, brought the ice crashing back and pinned her fast. An immense floe of ice, massing in upon the doomed ship, piled higher and higher above the bulwarks. "Get the boats onto the pans!" Captain Kean shouted to his men. It is just what they have had to do on many an Arctic expedition when the ice has nipped them.