xii Introductory 



the deep. There are some hundred species living on the earth today 

 (see complete illustrated list in Appendix E) and the great majority 

 of them would probably never even be called whales except by spe- 

 cialists. Most of them are quite small, and yet some of these, like the 

 porpoises, blackfish, narwhal, beluga, and certain dolphins, have 

 played a very important part in the life and economy of many races 

 of men for thousands of years. Our story, however, deals mostly, 

 though not exclusively, with a dozen of the larger kinds, namely 

 the black and arctic right whales, the blue, fin, piked, and sei ror- 

 quals, the humpback, the gray whale, the sperm whale, the bottle- 

 nose whales, and the common dolphin and common porpoise. These 

 are fully described as they appear in the narrative. The others are 

 dealt with more briefly either in the body of the story, in the last 

 chapter, or in Appendix E. 



Finally, we should interject here at the outset a word of caution. 

 We still don't know very much about anything, and our current 

 ideas on the past are grotesquely warped in certain respects. Our 

 cultural background in western Europe bequeathed to us a singu- 

 larly lopsided view of ancient history and a strangely biased opinion 

 of our own importance. Europe has been regarded by Europeans 

 for over a thousand years not only as the hub of the universe, but 

 also as the fountainhead of civilization. In point of historical and 

 geographical fact, it is nothing more than a large, rugged peninsula 

 at the west end of Eurasia, the greatest land block on earth, and the 

 womb of culture, as possibly also of modern man himself. One, two, 

 three, or even four thousand years of ascendancy by Europe or any 

 other part of the world is of little real significance in the over-all 

 sweep of history, and even our history is now being discovered to 

 be much more ancient than was previously supposed possible. 



Stone Age man in Europe, and his more cultured counterparts in 

 other continents, was not nearly so stupid and primitive as we used 

 to think. Jewelry was traded between Ireland and Crete two thou- 

 sand years before Christ; the Koreans used ironclad ships centuries 

 before we did; Indian princes sailed the open oceans with seven 

 hundred retainers in one ship before the Greeks had invented a fore- 

 and-aft sail; and rorquals were shot with harpoon guns a thousand 

 years before Svend Foyn initiated the modern whaling period. What 

 is more, all kinds of people were roving the oceans from continent 



