46 ESCHRICHT AND REINHARDT 



been expected, this picture represents an animal very different from tlie Greenland whale ; its 

 head is comparatively very small, not much more than a fifth of the whole lengtli of the animal, 

 and it has also the inflexion in the hind part of the outline of the under-lip so characteristic of 

 the South Sea whales. Thus, if no other right-whales different from the Greenland Avhale should 

 live in the Northern Atlantic (and at present we have no sufficient reason to believe that such is 

 the case), we may venture to suppose that in the cub caught near San Sebastian we have really 

 the Nordkaper or the Sarde of the ancient Basques before us ; and in this case its picture 

 confirms completely the opinion about it to which we had arrived by other means. 



In order to profit fully by the opportunity of studying the Nordkaper that thus most 

 fortunately had been procm-ed, one of the authors, Eschricht, went to Pampeluna in the year 

 1858. The special results of his examination of the young skeleton will be given in another 

 essay, which he intends to publish ; here it may be sufficient to state, that he has succeeded 

 in establishing the fact, that the Nordkaper, though belonging to the group of South Sea 

 whales, is really, as we had supposed, an independent species perfectly difiPerent from the Cape 

 whale. 



We may be considered, perhaps, to have proved sufficiently by the preceding examination, 

 that the Greenland whale was not in former times, any more than at present, found in the Bay 

 of Biscay ; that it has never been indigenous in the iceless European seas, but that it has been 

 confounded with another right-whale, the " Sarde " or the " Nordkaper," supposed to have been 

 found in these seas. 



We have still to examine whether it also appears on the opposite Eastern side of the 

 globe, and in that case to attempt to determine the limits of its range there, and especially to 

 show if it comes down regularly into Behring's Straits and the Behring Sea. The question, how- 

 ever, can scarcely be settled in a perfectly satisfactory way by means of the facts hitherto 

 ascertained, and as the little information we have been able to obtain ourselves is insufficient for 

 the purpose, we shall here only briefly touch upon it. 



It is a well-known fact, that several instances have been mentioned of whales having been 

 found in the Pacific,^ in which European harpoons were still sticking, a very long time before 

 any European whaler had visited that sea, which harpoons necessarily have been put into them 

 in the Arctic Seas on the opposite Western side of the globe. The earliest intelligence of such 

 incidents we owe to the crew of a Dutch vessel, which was wrecked on the island of Quelpaert 

 in the year 1653, after which they were kept in captivity for a long time in the Corea. In the 

 description of this country which was published after his return by one of the shipwrecked men, 

 Hendrik Hamel van Gorkum, he tells us that in the sea north-east of Corea, a great many 

 whales were found every year, some of which had still Erench and Dutch harpoons sticking in 

 them f and a more minute account of this may be found in Nikol. Witsen, who, in order to 



^ The first attempt to send whalers into the Pacific took place in the j^ar 1768, when a ship- 

 owner in London, Mr. Enderhy, sent out the Amelia round Cape Horn on a cachalot fishing 

 expedition. 



" Recueil de voiages au nord T. 4™°. (Amsterdam, 1718), p. 52. "II (Coree) n'est borne du 

 cote du Nord-Est que par une vaste mer, oii on trouve tous les ans una grande quantité de Balaines, 

 dont une partie porte encore les Crocs et les Harpons des Franpois et des Hollandois, qui vont ordi- 

 nairement &, cette péche aux extrémités de PEurope, vex-s le Nord-Est." 



