I remember, later in the voyage, seeing Kerfoot, another of the hunters, lose a finger by having it smashed to a jelly; and he did not even murmur or change the expression on his face.
Yet I have seen the same man, time and again, fly into the most outrageous passion over a trifle.
He was doing it now, vociferating, bellowing, waving his arms, and cursing like a fiend, and all because of a disagreement with another hunter as to whether a seal pup knew instinctively how to swim.

He held that it did, that it could swim the moment it was born.

The other hunter, Latimer, a lean, Yankee-looking fellow with shrewd, narrow-slitted eyes, held otherwise, held that the seal pup was born on the land for no other reason than that it could not swim, that its mother was compelled to teach it to swim as birds were compelled to teach their nestlings how to fly.
For the most part, the remaining four hunters leaned on the table or lay in their bunks and left the discussion to the two antagonists.

But they were supremely interested, for every little while they ardently took sides, and sometimes all were talking at once, till their voices surged back and forth in waves of sound like mimic thunder-rolls in the confined space.

Childish and immaterial as the topic was, the quality of their reasoning was still more childish and immaterial.