16 B 
THE VOYAGE OF THE VEGA. 
[chap. 
have also seen large shoals of this small species of whale on the 
north coast of Spitzhergen and the Taimur peninsula. 
Other species of the whale occur seldom on Novaya Zemlya. 
Thus on this occasion only two small whales were seen during 
our passage from Tromsoe, and I do not remember having seen 
more than one in the sea round Novaya Zemlya in the course of 
my two previous voyages to the Yenisej. At the north part of 
the island, too, these animals occur so seldom, that a hunter told 
me, as something remarkable, that towjirds the end of July, 1873, 
W.N.W. of the western entrance to Matotschkin Schar 20'to 30' 
from land, he had seen a large number of whales, belonging to 
two species, of which one was a slaethval, and the other had as 
it were a top, instead of a fin, on the back. 
It is very remarkable that whales still occur in great abun¬ 
dance on the Norwegian coast, though they have been hunted 
there for a thousand years back, but, on the other hand, if we 
except the little white whale, only occasionally east of the 
White Sea. The whale fishing which was carried on on so 
grand a scale on the west coast of Spitzhergen, has therefore 
never been prosecuted to any great extent on Novaya Zemlya; 
and fragments of skeletons of the whale which are found thrown 
up in such quantities on the shores of Spitzhergen, are not to be 
found, so far as my exi^erience reaches, either on the shores of 
Novaya Zemlya, on the coast of the Kara Sea, or at the places 
on the north coast of Siberia between the Yenisej and the Lena, 
at which we landed. The sacrifices which were so long made 
in vain in the endeavour to find a passage to China in this 
direction accordingly were not compensated, as on Spitzhergen^ 
by the rise of a profitable whale fishery. Meeting with a whale 
is spoken of by the first seafarers in these regions as something 
very remarkable and dangerous; for instance, in the account of 
Stephen Burroughs voyage in 1556:—''On St. James his 
day, there was a monstrous whale aboord of us, so neere to our 
side that we might have thrust a sworde or any other weapon in 
