With fin-backs and hump-backs, porpoises of colossal size appeared, and these Hearne harpooned cleverly when they came within range.

The flesh of these creatures was much relished on board, after Endicott had cooked it in his best manner.
As for the usual Antarctic birds, petrels, pigeons, and cormorants, they passed in screaming flocks, and legions of penguins, ranged along the edges of the icefields, watched the evolutions of the schooner.

These penguins are the real inhabitants of these dismal solitudes, and nature could not have created a type more suited to the desolation of the glacial zone.
On the morning of the 17th the man in the crow's-nest at last signalled the icebergs.
Five or six miles to the south a long dentated crest upreared itself, plainly standing out against the fairly clear sky, and all along it drifted thousands of ice-packs.

This motionless barrier stretched before us from the north-west to the south-east, and by merely sailing along it the schooner would still gain some degrees southwards.
When the _Halbrane_ was within three miles of the icebergs, she lay-to in the middle of a wide basin which allowed her complete freedom of movement.
A boat was lowered, and Captain Len Guy got into it, with the boatswain, four sailors at the oars, and one at the helm.

The boat was pulled in the direction of the enormous rampart, vain search was made for a channel through which the schooner could have slipped, and after three hours of this fatiguing reconnoitring, the men returned to the ship.