Midmorning by the Ice i6i 



In fact, he stays the rest of the night ashore, watching the bkibber 

 flensed from back and sides, the lower jaw cut out, and the baleen 

 removed, and when he returns to his ship, he takes with him the 

 first sheets of his speksnijefs tally. As he sits somberly in the back 

 of the skiff, his mind is filled with financial computations and navi- 

 gational problems, for it is obvious to him that these sardako baleak 

 are worth an infinity of trouble from now on. 



And so indeed they were, as other Dutch whaling captains and 

 finally the government of the Netherlands itself were also to dis- 

 cover. The sardako baleak of the Basques — now known to science 

 as Balaena mysticetus and in English as the "Bowhead," Greenland, 

 or Arctic Right Whale — is an immense creature, from forty-five 

 to sixty feet in length, though an unusually large one seventy feet 

 long was caught off Spitsbergen in 1900. It is commonly of the ap- 

 pearance described in our story above, but the amount of white on 

 the body varies greatly and the whole animal may be piebald. The 

 shape is as shown in the illustration in Appendix E, from which it 

 will be noted that the body is greater in girth and the head much 

 larger in proportion to the body than that of the black right whale. 

 So also are the tail flukes and fiippers, while the head is raised into 

 a sort of conical crest, on top of which is the blowhole. There are 

 350 to 370 baleen plates on each side of the mouth; these are black 

 and normally ten to thirteen feet long, but some of those of the sev- 

 enty-foot specimen mentioned above were over fifteen feet long. An 

 average specimen yields two thousand pounds and a large specimen 

 as much as three thousand pounds of baleen, which at one time was 

 worth four to five dollars a pound, or eight thousand to ten thousand 

 dollars. Even at a comparatively late date it cost only this amount 

 to fit out a whaling vessel for a whole season. 



Today, this species is rare, but in the sixteenth century it appears 

 to have existed in considerable numbers in the North Atlantic. These 

 animals are essentially an arctic species, staying by the Ice-front 

 where the krill and a small kind of swimming shellfish, a pteropod 

 known as Clio borealis, on which they feed, are found in great 

 abundance. They migrate with the Ice-front, being in latitudes 

 75° to 78° in summer — that is, in the East Greenland Sea in the 



