WHALES AND THEIR CLASSIFICATION 25 



(Baffin Land) to Lancaster Sound. Scammon 

 gives the ground of the Bowhead, as the American 

 whalers call this whale, in winter at 55 N. or 

 in Okhotsk Sea 54 or 53 N. Latitude, while in 

 summer it keeps to the edge of the ice. 



Off Northern Asia, from Nova Zembla eastward, 

 the Greenland Right Whale is not met with. 



In the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth 

 centuries, from 1611 onwards, there was a regular 

 fishery in Arctic waters between Spitsbergen and 

 Greenland for this whale, but it has now practically 

 disappeared in these waters. This is unquestion- 

 ably due to over " fishing " on the part of the 

 whalers. First of all the bay fishery at Spitsbergen 

 was exhausted (about 1623), then the open water 

 between Spitsbergen and the ice off Greenland, 

 then Davis Strait and Baffin Bay were in turn 

 exploited. In 1896 the Scottish whaling fleet of 

 nine ships obtained only eleven species of this whale. 

 In 1901 six Scottish whaling steamers caught four- 

 teen Greenland Whales. The history of the whale 

 fisheries shows clearly that in the Arctic region 

 between Northern America and Europe this species 

 of whale has almost become extinct. In the 

 American-Arctic regions this same whale (Bowhead) 

 still holds its own to some extent, since whaling only 

 commenced here two hundred years after the 

 Spitsbergen fishery. Moreover, the whaling season 

 north of Behring Strait is a much shorter one. 

 There were then originally three chief areas in 

 which this whale was found : 



