THE WHITE WHALE 1 75 



sea-tigers are about twenty feet long, and smartly pied, 

 like porpoises, in black and white ; their temper is 

 fierce, their appetites ravenous. They devour im- 

 mense quantities of cod, skate, and halibut. They 

 kill lesser porpoises, dolphins, and seals, and even 

 harry the huge "right" whale of Greenland, leaping 

 high out of the water, and striking it with their tails. 

 Grey whales are savagely attacked and their calves 

 murdered, torn to pieces, and devoured with 

 ferocious haste. Even the formidable walrus is 

 fiercely beset for the sake of its young. Perched on 

 the back of wary mothers, heavily armed with long 

 tusks, the little walruses might well be deemed safe, 

 but the orca suddenly butting the old walrus, the 

 luckless infant is pitched into the water and promptly 

 crushed and swallowed. Many years ago Eschricht 

 examined the stomach of a sixteen-foot killer. It 

 contained the remains of fourteen porpoises and 

 about as many seals in a hideously tangled mass; 

 the skin of an additional seal had choked it. Captain 

 Scammon's party once took another killer off 

 Asuncion Island; its stomach was full of young 

 seals. Well might Linnaeus style this ferocious 

 creature "balaenorum phocarumque tyrannus!" In 

 this category of destruction the defenceless beluga, 

 conspicuous in its creamy hide, is not spared. It is 

 said that white whales when pursued by the orca 

 will even run ashore in their terror; Virgil's line, 

 Inter delphinas Ario7i, might with dire significance 



