I9II] LESSER RORQUALS 365 
pack had to be the signal to heave to till daylight, which 
often meant till 6 a.m., as the morning twilight was found 
very bad for picking a way through the pack. 
The sea was now frozen over in the sort of large 
lakes or pools of still, open water that were found in 
this sea, and though this ice was never more than a 
few inches thick, it made a considerable difference to 
our speed. 
On March 2, while working through fairly loose pack, 
the wind that had been light westerly turned to E.N.E., 
March 2, with the immediate effect of closing the floes in, 
^^^^160° 16' ^^^P completely held up. During 
that night the wind shifted again to the 
southward and so topsails and foresail were set. It was 
merely waste of coal to try and steam through this ice, 
but the steady pressure of the ship under sail let her 
gradually, though very slowly, work through ; often held 
up by a floe for an hour or more, in the end she would 
manage to turn it and run ahead half a ship's length 
or so. This meant that in her wake was generally to be 
found a small pool of water clear of ice. 
A number of whales (lesser rorquals) were in this 
pack, and they soon discovered this clear water and took 
advantage of it to come and blow ; as there was not room for 
them to come up in the ordinary way, they had to thrust 
their heads up vertically and blow in a sort of standing-on- 
their-tails position. Several times one rested its head on a 
floe, not twenty feet from the ship, with its nostrils just on 
the water-line ; raising itself a few inches, it would blow 
and then subside again for a few minutes to its original 
