Until Arctic whaling ceased, the ships used to leave San Francisco or Seattle in time to arrive at Point Barrow when the ice had broken sufficiently to allow them to smash their way through, and then cruise about under sail or tie up to the floe-ice where they could watch for whales from the masthead. The bowheads have such acute hearing and are so very timid that if the vessels use steam the propellers would be heard at a long distance and a whale would never be seen. As soon as a whale is sighted, two or three small boats are lowered and each endeavors to be the first to reach the animal. The bowhead’s blowholes are situated on the summit of a prominent bunch and immediately behind them is a deep concavity over the base of the skull, and the “neck.” When the whale lies at the surface only the blowholes and back show above water, and the attacking boat, coming from behind, endeavors to sail directly over the submerged neck. As the boat crosses the whale, the harpooner thrusts a hand bomb-iron into the body; the bomb explodes and plows its way into the backbone, often killing the animal almost instantly. [Illustration: Stripping the blubber from the large right whale at Amagansett. This specimen was fifty-four feet long and the largest that has yet been scientifically recorded. ] The most difficult part of the work is to approach so noiselessly that the boat can cross the neck and place the bomb harpoon properly. If the whale is not killed at once it will usually run at considerable speed and, perhaps, dive under an ice-floe, in which case, if the boat does not carry sufficient line, the rope must be cut or certain destruction follows. As far back as tradition goes, the Eskimos of northern Alaska have been a race of mighty hunters and whalemen. At the largest villages, near every cape and headland, the passing of the dark days of winter marked the preparations for the great “devil dance,” the invariable prelude to the spring whale hunt. About April 1, all the able-bodied men of the village would build across the ice to the water a road over which they might haul their boats and sleds. Their gear, consisting of a few fathoms of walrus-hide line fitted with sealskin bladders and tied to a short flint-headed spear, was primitive enough, but effective. On the appearance of a bowhead all the boats took up a position in some comfortable nook along the edge of the ice-floe. When the whale came near a boat, the head man, whose place was usually in the stern, turned the canoe head-on toward the ice and sang the great death song, handed down from some famous whale-killing ancestor. This consumed fifteen or twenty minutes and then the harpooner thrust his flint-headed spear into the whale, doing little except frighten it nearly to death.