60 



THE POLAR WORLD. 



Thus we find an exuberance of life, in its smaller and smallest forms, peo- 

 pling the Arctic waters, and affording nourishment to a variety of strange and 

 bulky creatures — cetaceans, walruses, and seals — which annually attract thou- 

 sands of adventurous seamen to the icy ocean. 



Of these sea-mammalians, the most important to civilized man is undoubted- 

 ly the Greenland whale {Balcena mysticetus), or smooth-back, thus called from 

 its having no dorsal fin. Formerly these whales were harpooned in considerable 

 numbers in the Icelandic waters, or in the fiords of Spitzbergen and Danish 

 Greenland ; then Davis's Straits became the favorite fishing-grounds ; and more 

 recently the inlets and various channels to the east of Baffin's Bay have been 

 invaded ; while, on the opposite side of America, several hundreds of whalers 

 penetrate every year through Bering's Straits into the icy sea beyond, where 

 previously they lived and multiplied, unmolested except by the Esquimaux. 



THE WHALE. 



More fortunate than the smooth-back, the rorquals, or fin-whales {Bdlcenop' 

 tera hoops^ mnsculiis^phy sails, and rostratus), still remain in their ancient seats, 

 from which they are not likely to be dislodged, as the agility of their move- 

 ments makes their capture more difficult and dangerous ; while at the same time 

 the small quantity of their fat and the shortness of their baleen render it far less 

 remunerative. They are of a more slender form of body, and with a more 

 pointed muzzle than the Greenland whale ; and while the latter attains a length 

 of only sixty feet, the J3aloenoptera hoops grows to the vast length of 100 feet 

 and more. There is also a difference in their food, for the Greenland whale 

 chiefly feeds upon the minute animals that crowd the olive-colored waters above 

 described, or on the hosts of little pteropods that are found in many parts of 

 the Arctic seas, while the rorquals frequently accompany the herring-shoals, and 

 carry death and destruction into their ranks. 



The seas of ISTovaja Zemlya, Spitzbergen, and Greenland are the domain of 

 the narwhal, or sea-unicorn, a cetacean quite as strange, but not so fabulous as 

 the terrestrial animal which figures in the arms of England. The use of the 



