IIL] 
WHALES. 
169 
him, which we durst'not doe for feare he should have over- 
throwen our shippe; and then I called my company together, 
and all of us shouted, and with the crie that we made he de¬ 
parted from us; there was as much above water of his’back as 
the bredth of our pinnesse, and at his falling down he made 
such a terrible noise in the water, that a man would greatly have 
marvelled, except he had known the cause of it; but, God be 
thanked, we were quietly delivered of him/' ^ When Nearchiis 
sailed with the fleet of Alexander the Great from the Indus to 
the Eed Sea, a whale also caused so great a panic that it was 
only with difficulty that the commander could restore order 
among the frightened seamen, and get the rowers to row to the 
place where the whale spouted water and caused a commotion 
in the sea like that of a whirlwind. All the men now shouted, 
struck the water with their oars, and sounded their trumpets, so 
that the large, and, in the judgment of the Macedonian heroes, 
terrible animal, was frightened. It seems to me that from these 
incidents we may draw the conclusion that great whales in 
Alexander’s time were exceedingly rare in the sea which 
surrounds Greece, and in Burrough’s time in that which washes 
the shores of England. Quite otherwise was the whale regarded 
on Spitzbergen some few years after Burrough’s voyage by the 
Dutch and English whalers. At the sight of a whale all men 
were out of themselves with joy, and rushed down into the boats 
in order from them to attack and kill the valuable animal. The 
fishery was carried on with such success, that, as has already 
been stated, the right whale {Balmna mysticetus L.), whose 
pursuit then gave full employment to ships by hundreds, and to 
men by tens of thousands, is now practically extirpated. Thus 
during our many voyages in these waters we have only seen one 
such whale, which happened on the 23rd June, 1864, among the 
drift-ice off the west coast of Spitzbergen in 78° N.L. As the 
right whale still occurs in no limited numbers in other parts of 
^ Hakluyt, tirst edition, p. 317. 
