ORDER OE CETACEA. 
47 
straits of Lancaster, and even as far as Melville Bay. If it be 
true that there exists round the North Pole a sea free of ice during 
the summer season, as the hardy pioneers who are starting at this 
very moment to discover this Arctic Sea assert, it is probable that 
very numerous Whales will be found which have taken refuge in 
those latitudes as yet unknown to man. 
It is not only towards the arctic seas that the whalers have 
pushed their courageous expeditions. The antarctic regions have 
been equally explored. At the beginning of the eighteenth 
century, whalers from Massachusets (America) began to take the 
direction of the South Pole. They sailed along by Cape Yerd, 
the south-west coast of Africa, Brazil, and Paraguay, to the Falk- 
land Isles. Since then the English have also gone whaling in the 
south, and the ships of these two nations have ploughed up, not 
only the southern parts of the Atlantic Ocean, but the whole 
extent of the Great Ocean. The Americans have now more than 
300 whaling ships, all of which bring in large profits. Some, but 
a very few, French ships, have explored the same latitudes. 
The west coast of Africa, the Bay of Lagos, the mouth of La 
Plata, the coasts of Patagonia, New Holland, Tasmania, New 
Zealand, and the Sandwich Islands are the principal regions 
frequented by the whalers of the two worlds. As for the ancient 
hunting-grounds, we have already said that they are unstocked. 
The appearance of a Whale in the Gulf of Gascony is now an 
unheard-of event A The coast of Greenland, which was an excellent 
station, is now deserted. Baffin’s Bay has been exhausted by the 
English ; and Davis’s Straits, which was visited at the beginning 
of our century by more than a hundred whaling ships, belonging to 
different nations, counts only six or seven, which are not even sure 
of bringing home cargoes. 
We must not omit to mention here a remark made by M. Paul 
Gervais. This naturalist is disposed to think that the Whales 
which were formerly pursued so near to our shores (the French 
shores), were rather Borquals than Bight Whales. The chro- 
niclers of the middle ages, who are defective in their descriptions 
of that precision which is so desirable, may even have con- 
founded under the name of Whales, other large Cetaceans which 
* Rorquals of at least three species are still occasionally cast ashore on the French 
and British coasts. — Ed. 
