328 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



great extent, from the biological. This latter aspect of the endeavor 

 should be noted well at this juncture because, from that date on, it 

 becomes of ever-increasing importance. The principal cause of the 

 failure was, strangely enough, the absence of sufficient whales. 



Nobody, except "explorers," had ever before penetrated the Ross 

 Sea, which is a vast gulf cutting into the Antarctic continent to 

 within five degrees of latitude from the South Pole, and stretching 

 between longitudes 160° E. and 140° W. All those who had been 

 there reported vast quantities of whales disporting themselves in its 

 remote, ice-locked expanses of open water, and Captain Larsen con- 

 jectured that this sea must be one of the only remaining resorts of 

 the whales where they had never been molested and to which those 

 that had been might have retreated. However, even he did not seem 

 to realize that not only are whales unpredictable creatures at the best 

 of times, but also that their normal habits involve movements still 

 altogether unknown even to whalers, after centuries of practical ex- 

 perience, and behavior that has not yet been unraveled by the biolo- 

 gists, who only began to assemble the true facts about these un- 

 approachable animals at the end of the last century. 



Whales, both as a whole and as individual species, come and go 

 seasonally or from year to year in the most extraordinary manner. 

 It is not so much a question of where they go, as a matter of fact, 

 but where they come from. For instance, a whole party of great 

 lumbering beasts, more than a hundred strong, rushed upon a fore- 

 shore in the Dornoch Firth of Scotland in the fall of 1927 and be- 

 came firmly wedged among the rocks between tide levels. Local 

 inhabitants inspecting them decided they had never seen anything 

 like them before, and they requested outside help in identifying the 

 beasts. By great good fortune their appeal reached one of Britain's 

 real experts, Martin Hinton of the British Museum, who went up to 

 look at them. To his surprise they proved to be false killers, which 

 had not put in an appearance in Europe since they were first seen in 

 1 86 1. Where did these creatures come from and why had nobody 

 ever seen one before? It is the same with the larger species which 

 are of economic importance and which are therefore watched for 

 diligently and recorded carefully. 



There have been seasons when whales were extremely scarce 

 everywhere; there have been others like 1951 when even the most 



