My Father at length left the ship to give his personal attention to this difficult business. His first care was to examine the line at its fullest tension; but the exact direction was not discoverable because of the thickness of the verge of the ice. Slacking out, therefore, a considerable quantity of the line, he caused the boat to be backed off to a little distance, and, whilst it was kept off as much as possible by the oars of several boats attached, the line was hauled in, till, becoming nearly horizontal by tension, its direction beneath the ice could be clearly determined. By this direction he traced, by the eye, an imaginary corresponding line on the surface of the ice-field, which, by means of numerous irregularities and hummocks, he was enabled to do satisfactorily,—noticing particularly a very high and conspicuous hummock in this exact direction, and at about the distance to which the quantity of line run out might be supposed to reach. His next step, and that a truly scientific one, was to try to vary the line of direction, so that he might determine, by the intersection of lines, the position of the harpoon. This he effected by again slacking out the line, but to a much greater extent, and then causing the position of the boat to be changed by rowing slowly in a direction parallel to, and at some distance from, the edge of the ice, until the new direction might make a large angle with that previously determined. Time being allowed for the rope to subside into its position of rest, tension was given to it, as before, and another imaginary line traced by the eye on the ice. My Father now perceived that the point of intersection corresponded very nearly with the position of the remarkable hummock, almost a mile distant, before noticed, and that it must be immediately beyond it. Taking a whale-lance in his hand he walked over the ice to the place, and _just beyond_ the hummock he found a thin flat surface of much younger ice. Striking his lance repeatedly into this, he gradually effected its perforation; when, to his no small delight and to the amazement of the men who had followed his steps, his lance struck against a soft and elastic substance beneath:—it was the back of the dead whale!