Evening in the North 3 1 1 



of the Late Period employed against the mighty, toothed sperm 

 whale, it is the battle between the modern sailor and the rorquals 

 that has really brought this struggle into its proper perspective. 



The fin whales, notably the mighty blue whale, the greatest crea- 

 ture, apart from certain extinct sharks, that ever lived on this planet, 

 are not terrified lumps like the rights, nor brash hunters like the 

 sperms. They are slick ocean travelers of almost inconceivable power 

 and agility, and although they feed on pifliing minutiae or small fish, 

 they have the fighting spirit of the sperm, sometimes even of the 

 killer, and power unknown to either. An eighty-foot female blue 

 whale held fast by a modern harpoon head attached to three thou- 

 sand fathoms of line once towed a ninety-foot, twin-screw steam 

 chaser, with its engines going full speed astern, for seven hours at 

 a steady eight knots, covering over fifty miles without letup. The 

 thrust of a rorqual's tail, using the typical cetacean semirotary scull- 

 ing motion, has been estimated by British naval engineers to exert a 

 drive over twenty times more efficient than that of any screw of 

 similar dimensions we have so far devised. What is more, the stream- 

 lining of a rorqual far surpasses that of any submarine yet built by 

 man. These were the animals that the Norwegians set out to capture 

 with the aid of Svend Foyn's gun and steam chaser. 



There are only six kinds of rorquals — the Blue, or Sibbald's Ror- 

 qual; the Finner, or Common Rorqual; the Sei, or Rudolphi's Ror- 

 qual; the Piked, or Lesser Rorqual; Bryde's Whale; and the Hump- 

 back. Purists prefer to separate the last and reserve the name 

 "rorqual" for the first five. Of these, the piked and the sei have al- 

 ready been described, and while these have always formed a small 

 quota of the take, the modern industry was generally based on the 

 finner, then on the humpback, and finally, in its latest phase, on the 

 blue. The first and last of these have much in common; the hump- 

 back is remarkably different. 



This mammal was originally of world-wide distribution, but it 

 seems always to have preferred the cooler, temperate seas, though 

 it was once plentiful off such warm coasts as California and northern 

 New Zealand. It also occurs in the Antarctic polar ice masses. It is 

 known to zoological specialists by the rather delightful name of 

 Megaptera boops or nodosa. The generic name is a Latinization of 



