AS A VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY 
ments last year; that is, about one-seventh remain- 
ing above the surface of the water. 
Friday, 16th. — A small piece of ice was picked 
up to-day, however, whose specific gravity differed 
very much indeed from any that I have ever seen 
in these seas before. Its size would not admit well 
of being made into a cube, it was therefore formed 
into a rectangular parallelogram, two inches seven- 
tenths in breadth, and one inch seven-tenths in 
thickness; and when put into a bason of salt water, 
at the temperature of 35°, and of the specific 
gravity of 1.0262, only one-tenth of an inch re- 
mained above the surface of the water, or, in 
other words, one-seventeenth of the whole. 
We passed the Brunswick, of Hull, to-day, on her 
way home: they broomed * to us, that they had taken 
nineteen whales ; and, as she passed the Griper, they 
told them that there were about. fifty whalers to the 
northward (close to the coast of Greenland), be- 
tween the 74 and 75 degrees of latitude. This was 
all the communication we had with her; or, properly 
speaking, that the Griper had, for she passed too 
far from us to speak her. 
I have omitted to mention before, ‘that, during 
these two or three days past, we saw several large 
* This is a term used by the whale fishermen to express the 
manner in which they communicate to one another the number 
of whales they have taken. The way in which the intelligence is 
conveyed is this; on board the ship that is asking for the inform- 
ation in question, some person holds up a broom in a conspicuous 
place where it may be seen by the other ship, where some person 
with a similar instrument gives the required information by lifting 
a broom up over his head as many times as the number of fish 
they have taken; hence the origin and meaning of the term broom- 
ing a ship. 
