OCEANIC MAMMALS 507 



In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this was the 

 most valuable of the various whales that were hunted. The 

 large yield of oil and the value of whalebone at that time often 

 made a profit if even one whale were taken during a cruise. 

 The bowhead is remarkable on account of its distribution, for 

 it is a wholly Arctic species, found most of the year close upon 

 the edge of the ice pack in Arctic waters, following it north- 

 ward in spring, and retreating a short distance to the southward 

 with the coming of winter. The food of the bowhead is said to 

 be plankton in the form of small pelagic crustaceans, such as 

 copepods and shrimps, as well as the small mollusks of the 

 pteropod type, all of which swarm in Arctic seas. 



Three groups or populations of these whales were recognized 

 by the whalers. The first inhabited the waters in the neighbor- 

 hood of East Greenland, Jan Mayen, and eastward to the 

 Spitsbergen Archipelago, where they were especially abundant. 

 The second centered in Davis Straits and Baffin Bay, migrating 

 in winter as far south as the Gulf of St. Lawrence and in summer 

 penetrating northward to Lancaster Sound and Barrow Strait 

 to Melville Sound; and into Hudson Bay with the breaking up 

 of the ice. The third populatibn was found in the seas about 

 Point Barrow, Alaska. In winter the whales of this group 

 migrated through Bering Straits to the Okhotsk Sea and Bering 

 Sea, and in spring returned, passing Point Barrow to the east- 

 ward as soon as the ice pack opened there. It is uncertain how 

 far to the westward on the Asiatic side they penetrated. These 

 three groups seem to have been kept more or less apart by their 

 geographic isolation, yet it is likely that there was occasionally 

 some intermingling, particularly of the two latter populations, 

 in proof of which is often mentioned the case of a whale killed 

 in the Bering Strait region, with a Dutch harpoon embedded 

 in it, that was thrown at it by the whalers about Spitsbergen. 



Although the Basque whalers are believed to have taken this 

 whale on the south coast of Newfoundland at Grand Bay at an 

 earlier date, its intensive pursuit began about 1611. In this 

 year the Dutch discovered Jan Mayen Land, while in the same 

 year Thomas Edge of England was sent by the English Mus- 

 covy Co. on a whaling expedition to Spitsbergen. Here the 

 bowhead was found in such abundance that in the following 

 years Dutch, Danish, Hamburger, and Basque vessels were 

 actively killing them. The unsuspicious whales at first were 



