440 WHALE FISHERY. 



nally struck. In such cases, it is generally an object of 

 importance to sink it beneath the ice ; for effecting which 

 purpose, each lobe of the tail is divided from the body, 

 excepting a small portion of the edge, from which it 

 hangs pendulous in the water. If it still floats, bags of 

 sand, kedges or small cannon are suspended by a block 

 on the bight of the line, wherewith the buoyancy of the 

 dead whale is usually overcome. It then sinks, and is 

 easily hauled out by the line into the open sea. 



To particularize all the variety of pack fishing arising 

 from winds and weather, size of the fish, state and pecu- 

 liarities of the ice, &c, would require more space than 

 the interest of the subject, to general readers, would 

 justify. I shall, therefore, only remark, that pack fishing 

 is, on the whole, the most troublesoin^ and dangerous of 

 all others; that instances have occurred of fish having 

 been entangled during forty or fifty hours, and have es- 

 caped after all ; and that other instances are remem- 

 bered, of ships having lost the greater part of their stock 

 of lines, several of their boats, and sometimes, though 

 happily, less commonly, some individuals of their crew. 



2. Field Fishing. The fishery for whales, when 

 conducted at the margin of those wonderful sheets of 

 solfd ice, called fields, is, when the weather is fine and 

 the refuge for ships secure, of all other situations which 

 the fishery of Greenland presents, the most agreeable 

 and sometimes the most productive. A fish struck at 

 the margin of a large field of ice, generally descends 

 obliquely beneath it, takes four to eight lines from the 

 fast-boat, and then returns exhausted to the edge. It is 

 then attacked in the usual way, with harpoons and lan- 

 ces, and is easily killed. There is one evident advan- 

 tage in field fishing, which is this. When the fast-boat 

 lies at the edge of a firm unbroken field, and the line pro- 

 ceeds in an angle beneath the ice, the fish must necessa- 

 rily arise somewhere in a semicircle, described from the 

 fast-boat as a centre, with a sweep not exceeding the 

 length of the lines out; but most generally it appears in 

 a line extending along the margin of the ice, so that the 

 boats, when dispersed along the edge of the field, are ef- 

 fectual and as ready for promoting the capture, as twice 



