Page:Physical Geography of the Sea and its Meteorology.djvu/234

208 for its waters. No other hypothesis will explain the fact which observations reveal concerning the saltness of the sea, the constituents of sea-water, and many other phenomena. An attentive study of the currents of the sea, and a close examination of the laws which govern the movements of the waters in their channels of circulation through the ocean, will lead any one irresistibly to the conclusion that always, in summer and winter, there must be, somewhere within the arctic circle, a large body of open water. This open water must impress a curious feature upon the physical aspects of those regions. The whales had taught us to suspect the existence of open water in the arctic basin, and in their mute way told of a passage there, at least sometimes. It is the custom among whalers to have their harpoons marked with date and the name of the ship; and Dr. Scoresby, in his work on arctic voyages, mentions several instances of whales that have been taken near the Behring's Strait side with harpoons in them bearing the stamp of ships that were known to cruise on the Baffin's Bay side of the American continent; and as, in one or two instances, a very short time had elapsed between the date of capture in the Pacific and the date when the fish must have been struck on the Atlantic side, it was argued therefore that there was a north-west passage by which the whales passed from one side to the other, since the stricken animal could not have had the harpoon in him long enough to admit of a passage—even if that were possible—around either Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope.

423. Harpoons—habits of the whales.—The whale-fishing is, among the industrial pursuits of the sea, one of no little importance; and when the system of investigation out of which the "Wind and Current Charts" have grown was commenced, the haunts of this animal did not escape attentive examination. The log-books of whalers were collected in great numbers, and patiently examined, co-ordinated, and discussed, in order to find out what parts of the ocean are frequented by this kind of whale, what parts by that, and what parts by neither. (See Plate IX.) Log-books containing the records by different ships for hundreds of thousands of days were examined, and the observations in them co-ordinated for this chart. And this investigation, as Plate IX. shows, led to the discovery that the tropical regions of the ocean arc to the right whale as a sea of fire, through which he cannot pass, and into which he never enters. The fact was