188 MARINE MAMMALS OF THE NORTH-WESTERN COAST. 
ships have been capsized by it" (the jet of water). "It is also believed that the 
whale, like the porpoise and the dolphin, jumps entirely out of the water in order 
to take breath, and even that it has been heard blowing from a great distance off. 
This fish has neither hair nor scales, but is covered with smooth, hard, black, and 
thick skin, or hide, under which there is a layer of fat fully a foot in thickness, 
and this is what is sold during Lent. The tongue is marvelously large, and excel- 
lent eating ; and it is customary to salt and preserve it, as is also done with all 
the rest of the flesh of this fish. And that which is called whalebone (coste de 
lalene — literally, whale's ribs), with which ladies nowadays make their corsets 
and stiffen out their dresses, and which the beadles of some churches carry as 
wands — these are certain pieces cut off and drawn out from that which serves as 
eye -lids for the whale, and which covers his eyes, and which is furnished at its 
extremity with a kind of long, stiff hair. This is what the Latins call the pretentures, 
and which they say enables the animal to direct his course through the sea. As 
far as the other exterior and interior parts of the whale are concerned, they clearly 
resemble those of the sea -hog, and, making allowance for size, those of the por- 
poise and dolphin." 
Although this writer in some points gives us a very erroneous account of the 
whalebone whale, yet in a general view it is an intelligible description of the 
animal ; and it also establishes the fact that the animal's baleen, fat, and flesh were 
utilized at that period, the former being used as at the present day to distort the 
figures of women in their dress, and the latter was esteemed as luxurious food. 
The author's figure of the balaena is almost entirely in error, yet it is hardly more 
so than the representations of the same animal which may be found in popular 
works of the present century. We continue to quote from M'Culloch : 
"This branch of industry among the Basques and Biscayans ceased long since, 
and from the same cause that has occasioned the cessation of the whale-fishery in 
many other places — the want of fish. "Whether it was that the whales, from a 
sense of the dangers to which they exposed themselves in coming southward, no 
longer left the icy sea, or that the breed had been nearly destroyed, certain it is 
that they gradually became less numerous in the Bay of Biscay, and at length 
ceased almost entirely to frequent that sea ; and the fishers being obliged to 
pursue their prey upon the banks of Newfoundland and the coasts of Iceland, the 
French fishery rapidly fell off. The voyages of the Dutch and English to the 
Northern Ocean, in order, if possible, to discover a passage through it to India, 
though they failed of their main object, laid open the haunts of the whale. The 
companions of Barentz, who discovered Spitzbergen in 1596, and of Hudson, who 
