i;K) the voyage of the VEGA. [ciiAr. in. 



only with difficulty that the commander could restore order 

 among the frightened seamen, and get the rowers to row to the 

 place where the whale spouted water and caused a commotion 

 in the sea like that of a whirlwind. All the men now shouted, 

 struck the water with their oars, and sounded their trumpets, so 

 that the large, and, in the judgment of the Macedonian heroes, 

 terrible animal, was frightened. It seems to me that from these 

 incidents we may draw the conclusion that great whales in 

 Alexander's time were exceedingly rare in the sea which 

 surrounds Greece, and in Burrough's time in that which washes 

 the shores of England. Quite otherwise was the whale regarded 

 on Spitzbergen some few years after Burrough's voyage by the 

 Dutch and English whalers. At the sight of a whale all men 

 were out of themselves with joy, and rushed down hito the boats 

 in order from them to attack and kill the valuable animal. The 

 fishery was carried on with such success, that, as has already 

 been stated, the right whale {Balcena mysticetus L.), whose 

 pursuit then gave full employment to ships by hundreds, and to 

 men by tens of thousands, is now practically extirpated. Thus 

 during our many voyages in these waters we have only seen one 

 such whale, which happened on the 23rd June, 1864, among the 

 drift-ice off the west coast of Spitzbergen in 78° N.L. As the 

 right whale still occurs in no limited numbers in other jiarts of 

 the Polar Sea, and as there has been no whale fishing on the 

 coast of Spitzbergen for the last forty or fifty years, this state of 

 things shows how difficult it is to get an animal type to return 

 to a region where it has once been extirpated, or from which it 

 has been driven away. 



The whale which Captain Svend Foeyn has almost exclusively 

 hunted on the coast of Finmark since 1864 belongs to quite 

 another species, hlaohvcden [Balccnoptera Sihhaldii Gray) ; and 

 there are likewise other species of the whale which still in pretty 

 large numbers follow shoals offish to the Norwegian coast, wdiere 

 they sometimes strand and are killed in considerable numbers. 

 A tandkval, killer or sword-fish [Orca gladiator Desm.) was even 

 captured some years ago in the harbour of Tromsoe. This whale 

 was already dying of suffocation, caused by an attempt to 

 swallow an eider which entered the gullet, not, as the proper way 

 is, with the head, but with the tail foremost. When the mouth- 

 ful should have slidden down, it was prevented by the stiff 

 feathers sticking out, and the bird stuck in the whale's throat, 

 which, to judge by the extraordinary struggles it immediately 

 began to make, must have caused it great inconvenience, 

 which was increased still more when the inhabitants did not 

 neglect to take advantage of its helpless condition to harpoon it. 



