North Eastern Europe - The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques And Discoveries Of The English Nation - Volume 3 - Collected By Richard Hakluyt
- Page 196 of 510 - First - Home
At The Sight Of A Whale All Men Were Beside
Themselves With Joy, And Rushed Down Into The Boats In Order To Attack And
Kill The Valuable, Animal.
The fishery was carried on with such success,
that the right Whale _(Balaena mysticetus L.)_, whose pursuit then gave
full employment to ships by hundreds, and to men by tens of thousands, is
now practically extirpated.
As this Whale still occurs in no limited
numbers in other parts of the Polar Sea, this state of things shows how
easily an animal is driven away from a region where it is so much hunted.
Captain Svend Foeyn, from 1864 to 1881, exclusively hunted another species
(_Balanoptera Sibbaldii_ Gray), on the coast of Finmark; and other species
still follow shoals of fish on the Norwegian coast, where they sometimes
strand and are killed in considerable numbers. (Nordenskiold's _Voyage of
the Vega_, vol. I., p. 165).] And a little after we spied certaine Islands,
with which we bare, and found good harbor in 15 or 18 fadome, and blacke
oze: we came to an anker at a Northeast sunne, and named the Island S.
Iames his Island, [Footnote: Evidently one of the Islands at the south of
Novaya Zemlya.] where we found fresh water.
Sunday, (26) much wind blowing we rode still.
Munday (27) I went on shoare and tooke the latitude, which was 70 degrees
42 minutes: the variation of the compasse was 7 degrees and a halfe from
the North to the West.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 196 of 510
Words from 53898 to 54147
of 140123
