WHALES LANDED AT SCOTTISH WHALING STATIONS 199 



carcase, making a tit-bit of the tongue all after the very 

 fashion of primitive man, like Japanese fishermen or Aleuts 

 or Esquimaux in our own day. These Basques were the first 

 and most famous of European whale-fishers, who afterwards 

 taught the use of the "harpoon" (a word of their own 

 language) to the Dutch and English. When we began, 

 about 161 1, to explore the newly discovered coasts of 

 Spitzbergen, Edge, the agent of the English Muscovy 

 Company, took Basque harpooners with him, as Baffin and 

 other early voyagers also did ; and it was these men who 

 taught Edge and the others to distinguish between the 

 "Sarda" (again a Basque word) and the "Bearded whale," 

 as they called our Greenland whale, the former being 

 " somewhat lesser, and the finnes likewise lesser, and yields 

 in oil according to his bignesse, sometimes seventie hogsheads 

 or eightie hogsheads. And this whale has naturally growing 

 upon his back, white things like unto barnacles." 1 The 

 Basque fishery drew to a close, the Basque harpooners were 

 replaced by others ; but throughout the seventeenth and 

 eighteenth centuries the two whales were still clearly 

 distinguished by the whalers and by the historians of the 

 fishery, by Martens (for instance) and by Zorgdrager, and 

 by more general writers such as Duhamel de Monceau. 

 And naturalists likewise recognised the Sarde or Nordcaper 

 as a distinct species, up to the time of Lacepede (1804); 

 and even Cuvier did so in the first edition of the Regne 

 Animal (18 17). But Scoresby, to whom in many ways we 

 owe so much, went astray on this matter ; for, never having 

 met with the Nordcaper on his Arctic voyages, he came to 

 deny its very existence, and even went so far as to assert 

 that the whales of the Basque fishery had not been " right 

 whales" at all but only "finners"; and Cuvier {Ann. Sc. 

 Nat., 1824) adopted these views, and carried scientific 

 opinion with him for some forty years. At length (in 1854) 

 a true Basque whale (a female with its young 2 ) appeared off 

 its old haunts ; the mother escaped, but the cub (some 



1 Purchas, his Pilgrimes, 1625, part Hi., p. 710. 



2 There were two cubs, according to Markham, Proc. Zool. Soc, 

 l88i,p. 975. 



