We saw whales frequently. Sometimes the boats were lowered half a dozen times a day. Often we spent whole days in the boats, and even in our skin clothes it was freezing business sitting still on the gunwale of a beam-ended boat driving along at thrilling speed in the teeth of an Arctic gale. Our skipper was a good gambler, and he lowered whenever there was an off chance to bag a leviathan. As we worked to the westward, twin peaks rose out of the sea ahead of us. Covered with snow and ice, they stood out against the sky as white as marble. It was our first glimpse of Herald Island, in latitude 71 degrees north. We sailed north of the island and close to it. It looked forbiddingly desolate. Along the shores there was a rampart of black rock. Nowhere else was a glimpse of earth or herbage of any sort. The island was a gleaming white mass of snow and ice from the dark sea to the tips of the twin mountains. It was discovered in 1849 by Captain Kellett of the English ship _Herald_ and named after his vessel. Captain De Long, leader of the ill-fated _Jeanette_ expedition, was frozen in close to the island in the winter of 1880. He found polar bear plentiful and trapped and shot a number. Here at Herald Island we fell in with eighteen ships of the whaling fleet--all that had cruised to the westward--and it was only by good luck that some of them did not leave their hulks on those desolate shores. The polar pack rested solidly against the island's western end and curved in a great half-moon to the north and east. The pocket thus formed between the island and the ice looked good for whales and the ships hunted it out carefully. Far to the eastward, a long arm of ice reached out from the pack and grasped the island's eastern end. This arm was perhaps a mile wide. It barred our passage back to the open sea. The ships had been caught in a trap. They were bottled up in a hole of water perhaps a hundred square miles in extent. Busy on the lookout for whales, the captains of the fleet did not realize the situation for several hours. When they discovered their predicament, they hurried to the crow's-nests with glasses to try to spy out an avenue of escape. Sail was cracked on. The ships began to fly about like panic-stricken living creatures. The great polar pack was pressing rapidly toward the island. Unless the ships escaped, it seemed likely they would be securely hemmed in before night. In this event, if they escaped wreck by ice pressure they faced the prospect of lying still in an ice bed until the pack broke up in the spring. [Illustration: A Close Call Off Herald Island]