So long as the whales remained in the immediate vicinity of the fishing establishments, the boats were sent out of the bay, the fish captured at sea, towed into the harbour, stripped of the fat, and the blubber boiled in the manner described; but as the whales increased their distance, this plan of procedure became inconvenient, so that the ships began to cruise about the sea, to kill the whales wherever they found them, to take on board the blubber, and only occasionally to enter a port. So far now from having occasion for empty ships for carrying away the superabundant produce, it was a matter of difficulty and uncertainty to procure a cargo at all; and, with the most prosperous issue, there was not sufficient time for landing the cargo and extracting the oil; the blubber was therefore merely packed in casks and conveyed home, where the remaining operations of extracting the oil, and cleaning and preparing the whalebone, were completed. Hence, the various buildings, which had been erected at a great expense, became perfectly useless; the coppers, and other apparatus that were worth the removal, were taken away, and the buildings of all the different nations, both at Spitzbergen and at Jan Mayen Island, were either wantonly razed to the ground, or suffered to fall into a state of decay. When the whales first approached the borders of the ice, the fishers held the ice in such dread, that whenever an entangled fish ran towards it, they immediately cut the line. Experience, through time, inured them to it; occasionally they ventured among the loose ice, and the capture of small whales at fields was at length attempted, and succeeded. Some adventurous persons sailed to the east side of Spitzbergen, where the current, it is believed, has a tendency to turn the ice against the shore; yet here, finding the sea, on some occasions, open, they attempted to prosecute the fishery, and, it seems, with some success, a great whale-fishery having been made near Stansforeland, in the year 1700. The retreat of the whales from the bays to the sea-coast, thence to the banks at a distance from land, thence to the borders of the ice, and finally to the sheltered situations afforded by the ice, appears to have been fully accomplished about the year 1700, or from that to 1720. The plan of prosecuting the fishery now underwent a material change, especially in reference to the construction of the ships, and the quality and quantity of the fishing apparatus.