i68 DISCOVERY REPORTS 



and Ruud^ have, however, pubhshed a valuable summary of the catches made in the 

 Antarctic in 1929-30 and 1930-1 by Norwegian pelagic factories, illustrated by charts 

 which cover an area extending from the South Shetland Islands to the Ross Sea. In the 

 northern hemisphere D'Arcy Thompson in 1928- analysed data obtained at the Scottish 

 whaling stations and published charts, based on records for seven seasons, which show 

 for each month the positions where Fin and Sei whales were captured. In earlier 

 papers, published in 1918,''' the same author gave charts showing the positions off the 

 Scottish coast where Nordcapers, Sperm whales and Blue whales had been taken. 



COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS OF THE DATA 



The forms, as already mentioned, give information of two kinds, namely the positions 

 where whales were killed and observations on the directions in which whales were 

 moving. The reliability of the records, their limitations and the methods employed in 

 analysis may be conveniently discussed under these two heads. 



POSITIONAL DATA 



The positions recorded for each whale are invariably given by the whalers as bearing 

 and distance from the land, and since the whale-catchers are often out for several days, 

 frequently in thick weather and many miles from the coast, they can only be regarded as 

 rather rough approximations. We think, however, that this does not seriously affect 

 the accuracy of the charts on which the results are summarized, for errors from this 

 source tend to be eliminated by the methods we have employed. It is, moreover, only 

 the main concentrations of whales that show features of interest, and these, so far as 

 they were discovered by the whalers, we believe to be correctly indicated. 



As will be seen from Plates XXIII and XL the areas within which whales have been 

 killed, during the seasons with which these results are concerned, are very large. Off the 

 coasts of South Georgia the whaling grounds are some 300 miles both in length and 

 breadth, embracing an area of over 50,000 square miles. At the South Shetlands the 

 grounds extend from east and south of Clarence Island south-west to the Biscoe 

 Archipelago: the length is some 570 miles, the breadth in the middle about 160 miles 

 and the area over 80,000 square miles. It is, however, only on exceptional occasions — 

 when whales are uncommonly scarce or, in the South Shetlands, at particular times of 

 the year— that the more distant parts of the area are visited, and as will be seen from the 

 monthly charts there is thus great variation in the extent of ground covered by the 



1 Hjort, Lie and Ruud, Norwegian Pelagic Whaling in the Antairlic. Norsk Vidensk.-Akad. Oslo, 

 Hvalradets Skrifter, No. 3, 1932. 



- D'Arcy Thompson, On Whales Landed at the Scottish Whaling Stations during the years 1908-14 and 

 1920-7. Fisheries, Scotland, Sci. Invest., in, 1928. 



3 D'Arcy Thompson, On Whales Landed at the Scottish Whaling Stations, especially during the years 

 1908-14, Part I. Scottish Naturalist, 1918, p. 197. Parts II, III, ibid., p. 223. 



