46 
MAMMALIA. 
Biscayans. But from the sixteenth, century, the Whales, having 
become more timid, took refuge in the seas of Greenland and of 
Spitzbergen. They were then very numerous near the coasts and 
creeks or coves. The whalers very quickly got full cargoes when 
they remained near the land. Troops of Whales swam with con- 
fidence along the coasts and bays in the immediate vicinity of 
Greenland and Spitzbergen. They did not flee from the ships, 
and surrendered themselves without offering any defence to the 
avidity of the whalers. The Dutch had even built, in the island of 
Amsterdam, the village of Smeerenbourg (village of grease) . They 
here established warehouses and supplies of different sorts of goods. 
In the wake of their fleets of whaling ships they sent out other 
vessels, laden with wine, brandy, tobacco, and eatables. In these 
establishments they melted down the fat of the Whales they had 
brought there dead, and then brought the oil to Europe. 
But very soon the Whales became timid and altogether shy. 
They emigrated gradually and slowly, as if they quitted with 
regret the coasts and the bays where they were born, where, free 
and happy, they had lived and multiplied. 
They gained the regions of moving ice, whither the whalers 
soon pursued them. They then went and hid themselves under 
the fixed ice ; and, as their principal place of refuge, they chose 
the immense crust of ice, which the Dutch have named West-ys 
(the western ice). The whalers invaded this motionless ice. 
Pushing their boats on to the very edge of it, they looked out for 
the moment when the Whales were forced to quit this protecting 
vault, to come and breathe above the water. 
Thus it was that the whalers were obliged to abandon the 
waters of Spitzbergen, to go towards the great bank of ice which 
bounds, on the north-west, the Sea of Greenland. 
It is principally in these latitudes, that is to say, towards 78° or 
81° north latitude, or in Davis’s Straits, near the Isle of Disco, 
that whaling has been pursued with the greatest activity since 
the middle of the seventeenth century. But these last-named seas 
have been deserted in their turn, so that the English whalers are 
obliged now to pass over the ice in Baffin’s Bay, as far as the 
the northern temperate zone, at least under present conditions of temperature. 
Rorquals were formerly much more common in these latitudes; hut a Balcena 
Biscayensis is still believed in by some naturalists. — E d. 
