May, 1906.] 



KNOWLEDGE & SCIENTIFIC NEWS. 



425 



nationalities to participate in the capture of what he 

 calls " the ' Right ' or Sperm Whale," states that " the 

 competing whalers had the good sense not to quarrel 

 on the spot, and a fair division of the spoil (?) was ac- 

 cordingly arranged," a statement than which nothing 

 could be farther from actual facts, as I think tlie follow- 

 ing statistics will show. 



Shortly after the discovery of Spitzbergen by the 

 Dutchman, Barentz, in 1596, our countryman, Henry 

 Hudson, followed the same course, and his glowing 

 account of the vast numbers of whales and walrusses 

 there to be found induced the English Muscovy Com- 

 pany, in 1610, to send out vessels for their capture; 

 thereupon, under the impression that the Spitzbergen 

 group formed part of Greenland, the Danish Govern- 

 ment at once annexed them, but our James I., not to 

 be behind in securing so productive a territory, lost no 

 time in also asserting a claim to the islands and the 

 adjacent seas, and although the assumption on which 

 the King of Denmark based his pretensions proved not 

 to be tenable, I am not aware that either claim has ever 

 been officially renounced. 



In 1612 the Dutch followed us to Spitzbergen, and 

 for the next thirty years a fierce contention raged be- 

 tween the linglish, Dutch, Danish, and Trench crews 

 for supremacy with varying success and frequent 

 reprisals, the Dutch and Danes often calling in vessels 

 of war to their assistance, whilst the diplomatists at 

 home fought wordy battles with equal vigour. On the 

 whole, the Dutch, who generally worked fairly harmoni- 

 ously with the Danes, seem to have had the best of it, 

 and in 1623 they began to erect permanent settlements 

 on the shore for rendering down the blubber, which 

 eventually expanded to a considerable settlement known 

 as Smeerenburg, of the " rise and fall " of which Sir 

 Martin Conway has given such an interesting account 

 in a privately printed pamphlet (undated); they also had 

 depots in the island of Jan Mayen. For having roughly 

 driven two l?iscayan vessels from their fishing grounds, 

 only to subject them to similar treatment from the 

 English, the Frenchmen took a speedy revenge. Stay- 

 ing behind until the Dutch had returned home, they 

 pillaged the Jan Mayen station, loading up with the 

 spoil, which they sold in France, and destroying what 

 they could not remove. After the sack of St. Jean de 

 Luz by the Spaniards in the winter of 1636, when the 

 French whaling fleet was practically destroyed, very 

 little is heard of the Biscayans, and they finally ceased 

 to send out vessels in 1639. In 1642 the much 

 persecuted whales began to abandon the bays where 

 once they had been so plentiful, and the vessels had to 

 follow them into the ice. This led to their adopting the 

 plan of trying out the blubber at .sea or carrying it 

 homo to extract the oil, thus rendering the shore stations 

 useless, and they were gradually abandoned, till, by 

 1653, Sir Martin Conway tells us, the once famous 

 summer settlement of Smeerenburg was finallv aban- 

 doned 



It need hardly be said that the animal w liich formed 

 the quest of these ancient mariners was the Polar Right 

 \Vhalc, which yields the valuable " whalebone " as 

 well as oil, and that the Sperm Whale, a toothed whale 

 inhabiting the southern seas, was quite unknown to 

 them, or, at most, only occurred as an accidental 

 wanderer in the Arctic seas. 



The Right Whale has of late years been practic.ilh- 

 exterminated in the East Greenland seas, and those 

 now fished for from Shetland, Iceland, and Spitzbergen 

 are various species of " Finners," which occur in con- 

 siderable numbers and yield a varying quanlitv of oil 



.iccording to the species, but far less than the Polar 

 whale; their whalebone is also short and brittle, and of 

 little value. When these whales are killed they rapidly 

 sink, and are difficult to recover; therefore, it has be- 

 come the practice to pump air into the abdominal cavity 

 to cause them to float, but I never heard of " gas " 

 being injected for that purpose as stated by the maga- 

 zine writer referred to, and if he is not mistaken it is 

 quite a new departure. Decomposition sets in very 

 rapidly in a dead whale, and the appearance which the 

 author of the paper very excusably mistook for the 

 extrusion of the tongue is a prolapse of the lining 

 membrane of the throat caused by the pressure of the 

 air in the abdominal cavity; this is seen in the case of 

 stranded whales which have been some time dead, and 

 would doubtless be more pronounced after artificial in- 

 flation. 



The extent to vi^hich these Fin Whales have been 

 persecuted since Herr Foyn's invention in the waters of 

 both Europe and America has already greatly reduced 

 their numbers, and it needs no great gift of prophecy to 

 predict their early extermination; they are slow of re- 

 production, and long in coming to maturity, and the 

 only hope is that when they become too scarce to render 

 their pursuit profitable a remnant may be left to insure 

 the continuance of the race. 



I hope it will not be thought that in penning the above 

 remarks I am merely indulging in carping criticism. 

 My object is to call attention to the want of even rudi- 

 mentary knowledge of these interesting animals on the 

 part of the general public, notwithstanding the many 

 excellent recent works on X'atural History to be found 

 in all our free libraries. It might possibly be excused 

 that the uninitiated should fail to distinguish between 

 the Right Whale of the North Atlantic and its relative 

 inhabiting only the Polar Seas; but that the latter should 

 be confounded with the Sperm Whale — so totally differ- 

 ent an animal— whose proper home is in the Southern 

 Oceans, is simply incredible. 



It is not easy to make the personal acquaintance of 

 these giant animals, but a visit to the whale-room at 

 South Kensington Museum ought to convey much 

 g'eneral information, and I can promise those who 

 pursue the study that they will find it a very fascinating 

 one. 



Royal Institution. — The following arc the Lecture 

 Arrangements at the Royal Institution, after Easter : — 

 Professor G. Baldwin Brown, Two Lectures on Greek 

 Classical Dress in Life and in Art; Professor William 

 Stirling, Three Lectures on Glands and their Products; 

 Dr. P. Chalmers Mitchell, Two Lectures on The Diges- 

 tive Tract in Birds and Mammals; Rev. J. P. MahafTy, 

 Two Lectures on (i) The I-'xpansion of Old Greek 

 Literature by Recent Discoveries; (ii) The Influence of 

 Ptolemaic Egypt on Gra-co-Roman Civilisation; Pro- 

 fessor William J. Sollas, Three Lectures on Man and 

 the Glacial Period; Professor Charles ^^'aldstein, Three 

 Lectures on linglish Furniture in the Eighteenth Cen- 

 tury; Professor Sir James Dewar, Two Lectures on 

 The Old and the New Chemistry; and Professor W. 

 Macneile Dixon, Two Lectures on (i) The Origins of 

 Poetry; (ii) Inspiration in Poetry. The Friday Evening 

 Meetings will be resumed on April 27, when Professor 

 John W. Gregory will deliver a Discourse on Ore De- 

 posits and their Distribution in Depth. Succeeding 

 Discourses will probably be given bv The Hon. Charles 

 .\. Parsons, Professor J. H. Povnting, Professor Arthur 

 .Schuster, Mr. I^onard Hill, Professor H. Moissan, and 

 Professor Sir James Dewar, and other gentlemen. 



