While the calm and thick weather lasted, a number of the officers and men amused themselves in the boats, in endeavouring to kill some of the white whales which were swimming about the ships in great numbers; but the animals were so wary, that they would scarcely suffer the boats to approach them within thirty or forty yards without diving.  Mr. Fisher described them to be generally from eighteen to twenty feet in length; and he stated that he had several times heard them emit a shrill, ringing sound, not unlike that of musical glasses when badly played; This sound, he farther observed, was most distinctly heard when they happened to swim directly beneath the boat, even when they were several feet under water, and ceased altogether on their coming to the surface.  We saw also, for the first time, one or two shoals of narwhals, called by the sailors sea-unicorns.

A steady breeze springing up from the W.N.W. in the afternoon, the ships stood to the northward till we had distinctly made out that no passage to the westward could at present be found between the ice and the land.  The weather having become clear about this time, we perceived that there was a large open space to the southward, where no land was visible; and for this opening, over which there was a dark water-sky, our course was now directed.

Since the time when we first entered Sir James Lancaster’s Sound, the sluggishness of the compasses, as well as the amount of their irregularity produced by the attraction of the ship’s iron, had been found very rapidly, though uniformly, to increase as we proceeded to the westward; so much, indeed, that, for the last two days, we had been under the necessity of giving up altogether the usual observations for determining the variation of the needle on board the ships.  This irregularity became more and more obvious as we now advanced to the southward, which rendered it not improbable that we were making a very near approach to the magnetic pole.  For the purposes of navigation, therefore, the compasses were from this time no longer consulted; and in a few days afterward, the binnacles were removed as useless lumber from the deck to the carpenter’s storeroom, where they remained during the rest of the season.

A dark sky to the southwest had given us hopes of finding a westerly passage to the south of the ice along which we were now sailing; more especially as the inlet began to widen considerably as we advanced in that direction:  but at three A.M. on the morning of the 8th, we perceived that the ice ran close in with a point of land bearing S.b.E. from us, which appeared to form the southern extremity of the eastern shore.