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It is the custom among whalers to have their harpoons marked with date and name of ship, and Dr Scoresby, in his work on arctic voyages mentions several instances of whales having been taken near Behring's Straits, with harpoons in them bearing the stamp of ships that were known to cruise in the Greenland seas; and the dates on the harpoons were so recent as to preclude the supposition that the said whales had, after being struck, made a voyage round the capes above mentioned, even were such a voyage possible to them.
"Hurrah!" ejaculated the professor; "hurrah! Scoresby and Kane spoke the truth; and my pet theory turns out to be correct, after all. Gentlemen, look round and feast your eyes upon the glorious spectacle of an open Polar Sea!" Whether it actually was an open sea, or only an unusually wide channel between two ice-fields, was now the question to be settled.
Being an enthusiast in scientific research, Dr Scoresby was availing himself of the opportunity afforded by this storm to measure the waves! Others have made similar measurements, and the result goes to prove that waves seldom or never rise much more than ten feet above the sea-level.
Some of the Sperm Whale drawings in J. Ross Browne are pretty correct in contour; but they are wretchedly engraved. That is not his fault though. Of the Right Whale, the best outline pictures are in Scoresby; but they are drawn on too small a scale to convey a desirable impression.
By now Richard would be on his way thither with Ruth, and Wilding was in haste that she should be reassured that he had not fallen to the muskets of Wentworth's firing-party. But Bridgwater was far, and he began to realize, now that all excitement was past, that he was utterly exhausted. Next he thought of Scoresby Hall and his cousin Lord Gervase.
I have heard Captain Scoresby say, that, when a whale is struck, it is an object of importance to drive the weapon socket-deep into the blubber, or outer rind, of the floating monster; but in the case of the porpoise the true point of skill appears to lie in the aim alone: for the mere weight of the instrument, with its loaded staff, is sufficient to lodge the barbs in the body of the fish, and in many cases to carry it right through to the other side.
Scoresby succeeded in exploding gunpowder by the sun's rays, converged by large lenses of ice; here we have succeeded in producing the effect with a small lens, and with a terrestrial source of heat. In this experiment, you observe that, before the beam reaches the ice-lens, it has passed through a glass cell containing water.
With Lady Horton and Diana she took her way to Saint Mary's Church at noon, and there she found Mr. Wilding very fine in a suit of sky-blue satin, laced with silver awaiting her. And with him was old Lord Gervase Scoresby, his friend and cousin, the very incarnation of benignity and ruddy health. For a wonder Nick Trenchard was not at Mr. Wilding's side.
The temperature rose singularly during this terrible night; the thermometer marked fifty-seven degrees, and the doctor, to his great astonishment, thought he saw flashes of lightning in the south, followed by the roar of far-off thunder that seemed to corroborate the testimony of the whaler Scoresby, who observed a similar phenomenon above the sixty-fifth parallel.
On the latter ship Markham's and Mill's glossary was, of course, used, but apparently not slavishly; founded, as far as sea-ice went, on Scoresby's, made in 1820, it might well have been adopted in its entirety, for no writer could have carried more weight than Scoresby the younger, combining as he did more than ten years' whaling experience with high scientific attainments.
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