270 



♦ KNOWLEDGE 



[Sept. 



looking through a prism of Iceland spar at the sunset 

 'ight reflected from the windows of the Luxembourg 

 Palace, noted its disappearance and reappearance as he 

 rotated his prism. 



(To he contimted.) 



THE RIGHT WHALE OF THE NORTH 

 ATLANTIC. 



AS every one knows, right whales were once very 

 common in the Gulf of Gascony, the dwellers 

 along which, in France as well as in Spain, appear to 

 have been the first Europeans to raise the fishery of these 

 monsters of the deep to the rank of a great industry. 

 Upon the coast of Cantabria are still to be seen the ruins 

 of the towers where watchers were stationed to give 

 notice of the appror.ch of the numerous whales that 

 visited these shores during winter, and the remains of 

 the furnaces where the fat was melted. Official docu- 

 ments and royal edicts of the twelfth and thirteenth 

 centuries speak of the whale fishery as an already ancient 

 industry. The majority cf the cities of the Spanish 

 coast - Fontarabia, Guetaria, Motrice, ic. — have figures 

 of whales or of fishing implements on their coat-of-arms. 

 The Basques were soon no longer content to fish for 

 whales on theii coasts, where" they were becoming .scarcer 

 and scarcer, but pur.sued them into the English Channel 

 and North Sea, and as far as to Iceland. Later on, at the 

 close of the fourteenth ccntiiry, they did not hesitate to 

 sail out upon the broad sea toward the quarter where 

 Cabot, a hundred years afterward, discovered Newfound- 

 land, and where they found the cetacean very abundant 

 during the summer months. Their success made rivals 

 for them, and in 1578 there were, on this part of the 

 ocean, three hundred ships — French, Spanish, Portu- 

 guese, and English. 



Fishing upon the high sea is scarcely applicable to any 

 but the sperm and true whales — those whose back is 

 even, finless, and without a hump — the "right whales" 

 of fishermen (BaliTna, L. ; Eubahena, Gray; Leiohalrena, 

 Eschricht). The other cetaceans — the "finbacks" and 

 "humpbacks" of fishermen, and Bahnophra and Megap- 

 tera of naturalists — almost always sink when killed, and 

 are thus lost to the captors unless they are driven into a 

 bay, where the carcass, upon making its appearance on 

 the surface in a few days, can be towed to the shore and 

 cut up. It is very probable, then, that the cetaceans 

 that the old Basques fished for were sperm and right 

 whales, and especially the latter, which were much 

 commoner than the former in temperate or cold water. 



As a consequence of the war against it, the whale 

 became more and more rare. In the seventeenth century 

 the seas in the vicinitj' of the pole, where navigators in 

 search of a north-east passage to India had sighted a 

 large number of the animals, which were remarkable 

 for their gigantic size, became the scene of the fishery. 

 A century later, the scene shifted to Baffin's Bay. Did 

 these whales and those that were formerly fished for 

 n the temperate part of the Atlantic belong to the 

 same species ? Upon the authority of Cuvier, when 

 cetology was scarcely beginning to get out of its 

 swaddling-clothes, zoologists answered in the affirma- 

 tive, giving as the reason why whales were no longer 

 found in the temperate zone that they had taken 

 refuge amid the ice of the poles in order to hide them- 

 selves from pursuit ! This is a gross error, which was 

 perpetuated for a long time, which is still found re- 



peated in many books, and which has been com- 

 mitted not only concerning the right whales of the 

 North Atlantic, but also the various species of frni- 

 whales distributed through the different oceans. Tlu- 

 same causes have evei-ywhere produced the sami- 

 effects — the almost entire disappearance of the large, 

 utilisable cetaceans. No longer than thirty years ago 

 the whaling industry still occupied whole fleets; and 

 the Ariiericans, who had almost the entire monopoly 

 of it, repiutid with pride that their whaling vessels 

 placed in a line in sight of one another, would occupy 

 more than half of a great circle of the globe. In 185G 

 they still had 65.5 ships on the sea, but to-day th<^ 

 industry is almost completely abandoned for lack cf 

 whales. Fishing is no longer done except by a few rare 

 ships from the ports of Scotland, that go out to the 

 Polar Sea for seals, and fish for whales incidentally. In 

 the large seas of the temperate zones, the South 

 Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Indian Ocean, where fifty 

 years ago a load of dil \v;is dV.fiiiiud in a very short time, 

 whales ;-,re now so r;ii'' tlmt it in:iy almost be said that 

 there ar^ none. It ha.s hwu s.iiil tliat the whales of these 

 seas fled towards the poles in order to escape man ; but 

 it is now well ascertained that the different species oi 

 right whales are quartered in spaces in which they 

 accomplish, according to the season, periodical naviga- 

 tions that are necessitated by need of food and the par- 

 turition of the females, and which their organisation 

 does not permit them to leave. If no more of them are 

 found, it is simply because they have been destroyed. 

 Moreover, the frosts of the poles have proved no more 

 of a barrier to whalemen than the heat of the tropics ; 

 every corner of the globe has been explored whithei- 

 ships could venture, even at the risk of a thousand 

 dangers. Just as soon as a new field was made known as 

 productive, everybody flocked thither, and it was soon 

 exhausted — a result that is explicable without recourse 

 to the theoiy of flights or migrations en 7nassf. 



While regarding the polar whale, Balcna mysticetus, 

 L.) as the same as was formerly fished for in the tem- 

 perate North Atlantic, naturalists (Cuvier among them) 

 catalogued, under the name of B. glacialis, another 

 species which differed from B. mydicttus in its much 

 smaller size, its slenderer body, its much smaller head, 

 and its shorter mouth-plates ("whale-bone"), and 

 which inhabited the shores of Iceland and Norway. 

 The Icelanders called it Sletbak, the Dutch, Nordkaper, 

 and the French, Sarde — a name that the Basques gave to 

 the whale of the Gulf of Gascony. It is astonishing that 

 this name did not attract the attention of naturalist.s, 

 and that they did not ask whether the Shtbak of the 

 Icelanders, the Nordkaper of the Dutch, and the Sarde of 

 the Basques was the same animal. A discussion of the 

 old fishery narratives and of documents derived from the 

 Dutch and Norsmen answers yes. A Norse MS. of the 

 twelfth century, the Boyal Mirror, teaches us that the 

 Icelanders fished in the entire North Atlantic, and they 

 perfectly distinguished two species of right whales — one 

 at the north and the other at the south. They knew 

 besides that these animals never frequented the same 

 waters, and that the northerly limit of the one was the 

 southerly limit of the other. 



If representatives of the southern species remained, 

 they must have been very rare, for one could traverse 

 and retraverse the North Atlantic without meeting a 

 single one of them. The case is cited of a right whale 

 stranded upon Ke Island, in February, 1680, and in 178."> 

 a whaleman harpooned one between this island and 

 Newfoundland. Cod fishermen have spoken raucU 



