This extraordinary feat of tact and strength was first accomplished, I believe, during my Father’s command of the Dundee; but the feat was repeated, under my own observation, on board the Resolution, and the tardiness of a burdensome system, still too prevalently acted upon by the officers, was similarly rebuked. To the extent, at least of a saving of _one-half_ the time spent in the operation by the harponeers, the bold experiment, single-handed and with but one-third of the crew, was successfully repeated. My Father’s plan of proceeding, in this extraordinary feat, is worthy of notice. His constitutional habit, as I may term it, of a sort of _deliberate celerity_ was here the characteristic of his progress. But no time was wasted. As fast as the men on deck could heave-up the blubber, the blubber was freed to their hands. Every change of tackle, or place of working, was so managed as to leave no interruption in the labours of his men. As he never himself ceased working, he took care by judicious preconsideration, that they should never stand idle. On the contrary, he had his own part always in advance of their province, so that, in order to keep pace with him, they were stimulated to the utmost practicable degree of activity. The capstan, whilst the tackle was slack, or the strain slight, actually spun round, whilst the hands on it, “shortening in on the bars,” ran at their utmost speed. An instinctive spirit was infused into every department; for no section of the men liked to be behind, so as to be in the humiliating position of hinderers of the others. Though the master-hand was accomplishing so much in so short a time,—more, in this species of work, I may be bold to say, than any other man ever did before or since,—there was no appearance of hurry. His sharp and finely-polished _spade_ with which he chiefly worked, seemed to meet with no resistance from the animal textures against which its edge was directed. Instead of cutting downward through the blubber a spade-breadth at a time, as most usually was done, he would run the instrument in a direction obliquely horizontal, so as to separate the slip then heaving up from the general envelopment of the blubber, for a yard or two in extent, at a single stroke or thrust of the instrument. The slight attachment of the blubber to the muscles of the carcass could then be usually torn away (with a touch underneath with the spade when incidentally needful to be cut) by the force with which the slip was being raised by the mechanical engines in motion on the deck. Thus proceeding with calm and quiet self-possession, and with unceasing perseverance, few cuts being made but at the best advantage, and no stroke of his cutting-tools being struck in vain, the work proceeded with such despatch as to accomplish the extraordinary results we have just described. FOOTNOTES: