14 WHALES 



accompanied the god of the sea - the Roman Neptune, the Greek 

 Poseidon and the Finnish Wellamo (Fig. 1 14). The dolphin gave its name 

 to the heir to the French throne, and even in om' own prosaic world, its 

 image can be found on an Italian five-lire piece (Fig. 3). 



We cannot leave the Greeks without mentioning a beautiful blown glass 

 figure, 7 inches long, kept in the British Museum (Fig. 6). This 

 figure, dating from the first century B.C., probably represents Cuvier's 

 Beaked Whale or, as it is sometimes called, the Goose-Beaked Whale, 

 a species which grows to a length of 26 feet and inhabits the Mediterranean 

 to this day. 



Roman authors such as Pliny and Galen added little to our know- 

 ledge of the Cetaceans. On the contrary, they did more harm than good 

 by confusing them with fishes, and by allowing all sorts of fantasies to 

 creep into their descriptions. 



The Middle Ages turned their back on scientific observation and even 

 Olaus Magnus, who published a book about the Arctic in 1555, contri- 

 buted mostly fable and misinterpretation. A great number of imaginary 

 animals are also described in Konrad Gesner's Historia Animalium ( 1 55 1 ) . 

 To us, the most interesting of these is probably the unicorn (Fig. 8), a 

 horse with cloven hooves, a lion's tail, and a horn in the middle of its 

 forehead. The unicorn was fii'st introduced into the English royal coat of 

 arms by James I, and if we look carefully at it, we see that its horn resembles 

 the greatly elongated spiral tusk of the male Narwhal, an Arctic dolphin 

 some 13-16 feet in length (Fig. 7). Narwhal tusks, which were said to be 

 endowed with miraculous properties, had undoubtedly found their way 

 to Southern Europe, where they were ground into a powder with 

 supposed medicinal qualities, since earliest times. Wormius (1655) was 

 the first to identify them, and since his day their miraculous power 

 seems to have waned. The tusks weie relegated increasingly to museums 

 and collectors' shelves, though in 1955 they once again attained prom- 

 inence when nine Eskimos from Cape Dorset were commissioned to make 

 a mace for the government of the N.W. Territories of Canada. The mace 

 was to consist entirely of Canadian products, and when it was finished a 

 Narwhal tusk served as its handle. 



The fact that dolphins, porpoises and whales were known to Europeans 

 long before the Middle Ages is also borne out by the derivation of the 

 word 'whale'. The Norwegian hval, the Dutch and German wal, and the 

 Anglo-Saxon hwael are thought to be related to the modern English 

 wheel, and must have referred to the characteristic turning motions of 

 whales when they come up to breathe. 



Strandings of whales and large dolphins are reported in many medieval 

 chronicles. They were generally looked upon as portents of important 



